On Thursday, Harness announced it had acquired Augment Code's Cosmos software factory, Auggie CLI, and Code Context Engine, along with the engineering team responsible for them, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition brings autonomous coding agents into Harness's existing software delivery platform, which already manages testing and deployment workflows.
Harness intends to rebrand the acquisition as the Harness Cosmos Software Factory Agent and plans to connect Augment's codebase understanding capabilities with Harness's delivery history. This integration would enable coding agents to draw on records of past deployment failures when making code modifications and to receive feedback from downstream systems when those changes fail validation checks. While Cosmos is available immediately, these integrated capabilities have not yet been released.
AI's impact on software will not be measured by how much code it generates, but by how much valuable software reaches customers.
Jyoti Bansal, Harness founder and CEO
The acquisition reflects Harness's investigation into what it calls the AI velocity paradox—research showing that accelerated code generation was straining testing and release processes that had not evolved at the same pace.
Inside the Cosmos factory
Cosmos transforms requirements or bug reports into pull requests by having agents write and test code within isolated virtual machines. The system can also address failed checks and incorporate review comments on existing pull requests, using feedback from previous iterations to refine subsequent changes.
Organizations have the ability to fork and adapt agents to match their specific workflows, while Augment's Code Context Engine supplies relevant codebase context during the development process.
We set out to bring AI to the entire software development lifecycle, starting with context-aware coding, with engineers stepping in only where judgment really matters.
Igor Ostrovsky, Augment Code co-founder and CTO
Where humans still approve
Developers retain the authority to approve and merge changes, though Bansal noted that teams can configure which tasks agents handle independently and which require human review or approval. Cosmos remains accessible via Augment's existing interface while Harness prepares to integrate it into its broader platform.
Turning failures into fixes
Harness intends to link Augment's Code Context Engine to its Software Delivery Knowledge Graph, granting Cosmos access to deployment history and security findings when working on code changes. This connection would also enable Harness's downstream agents to leverage repository context to investigate failures and identify what requires correction.
When Harness downstream agents identify an issue while testing, securing, or deploying code, they send it back to Cosmos with the context to fix it.
Jyoti Bansal
A failed deployment could be returned to Cosmos for revision, with failure context passed directly to the coding agent rather than requiring a developer to diagnose the problem and open a separate ticket. Harness has not announced a release date for this integration or detailed how context will flow between the Code Context Engine and the delivery graph, including the mechanisms agents will use to retrieve relevant information from each system.
Who controls agent permissions
Harness plans to place Cosmos under the identity and policy controls of its Agent Harness but has not disclosed how permissions will function across both systems—a notable omission as the industry moves toward agent identity frameworks, exemplified by Microsoft assigning identities to its Copilot agents.
Cosmos currently operates agents in isolated VMs with configurable review checkpoints, though the scope of production data agents will be permitted to access and which downstream actions they can execute remain unclear. These constraints warrant careful examination, particularly given an incident in which coding agents exposed more than 13,000 screenshots through standard workflows without any attacker gaining system access.