3 ms·

Does anyone have a suggestion for a harness that is good at handoff? When I say handoff, I mean: * handoff from a terminal CLI to webui (on a phone)? * h

by xrd 1mo ago

Does anyone have a suggestion for a harness that is good at handoff? When I say handoff, I mean: * handoff from a terminal CLI to webui (on a phone)? * handoff from one team member, to another? * handoff from one communication modality, like writing a prompt in a TUI, to email? * handoff from one model to another, or one provider (openrouter)( to another (llama.cpp) Does such a thing exist? I used to think that a PR would be a good place to centralize all this. Who cares what IDE, or developer, or location. But, now I feel like an agent harness might contain that better. Why do I want handoff? I keep losing context of where my harness is running. Sometimes I am inside an isolated VM. Sometimes I'm on my laptop, sometimes I'm on my home machine with the big GPU for local models. If I could spin up a harness that could identify itself inside my tailscale network, then I could probably have a single web UI which allows me to keep all that context straight. I'm tempted to experiment with Pi to configure such a thing. But, perhaps there are patterns out there already with a harness I have not considered.

ds_opseeker 1mo ago
Sounds like you want an orchestration. Let's assume handoff happens when one "agent" finishes its work on one task, i.e. "submit a PR". At that point you want to exit the agent/clear context etc (any context the next actor needs should be in the handoff artifact). And the orchestrator calls the next agent with the artifact. Claude can do this with subagents. If you want to get more serious, I'd look at "durable workflows" and check out what the pi people have to say: https://earendil-works.github.io/absurd/ https://earendil-works.github.io/absurd/ https://earendil-works.github.io/absurd/patterns/pi-ai-agent/ https://earendil-works.github.io/absurd/patterns/pi-ai-agent... you should also look at dbos https://www.dbos.dev/ https://www.dbos.dev/ And then do a search for these terms on HN and get some idea of their shortcomings vs a 'real' orchestration tool like Airflow or Dagster
YZF 1mo ago
I do this all the time in my workflow. Use any harness. Ask it to create a markdown file with the information required for the handoff. Use that downstream. Keep a "repo" of those markdown files. Are you trying to orchestrate or manage this sort of process?
itishappy 1mo ago
The session is "just" the raw chat history in it's entirety (human and agent) and can be disseminated as such. This is what enables swapping between models, you simply send the whole context. Not sure how others do it, but opencode stores sessions in a sqlite db and you can extract them and share them as needed. https://opencode.ai/docs/cli/#export https://opencode.ai/docs/cli/#export Pro-tip: Building your own extremely minimal harness takes about 15m and is both fun and enlightening. Agents are unsurprisingly quite good at it, but ask them to walk you through it step by step.
- dbmikus 1mo ago
  For a truly "handoff-able" session, you also need to store the data it was working on. In most cases, these are the git patches
- gf000 1mo ago
  Another common format is `jsonl`, basically a json object per line containing a message
speed_spread 1mo ago
Hermes has /handoff to go from cli or desktop to IM, possibly other ways.
izgorodin 1mo ago
[flagged]
dbmikus 1mo ago
I'm working on this at my startup, amika.dev Open core is here: https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika We're designing it like a meta-harness actually. The goal is to let users put any agent(s) (Claude, Codex, Pi, OpenCode) on a sandbox on any computer (local, K8S pod, cloud VPS, sandbox provider, etc.) And then be able to interact with the agent(s) from anywhere: terminal, phone, web, or load them into the Codex, Claude, or Cursor apps Yapped a bit about this "multi-surface" agents idea last week: https://x.com/dbmikus/status/2087993214246469639 https://x.com/dbmikus/status/2087993214246469639 Under the hood, I think of part of our tech like mashing together Tailscale and Firecracker. The edges are rough right now, but if you kick the tires, I appreciate any feedback! (my email is dylan@amika.dev) And besides what we're building, there are cool projects like Amp Orbs, YC's QM harness, etc.
gf000 1mo ago
Not really solving all your cases, but I found tmux (or herdr) on a home server works pretty well. I just ssh into my home server and continue where I left off with the same claude/opencode open. On a longer term, I think "assistant" style harnesses might help here, like vellum.ai. I no longer use that, but I asked it to create an ACP proxy through iroh (basically tailscale but on the application layer), and it managed to control claude on another device of mine. A friend did similar stuff with tailscale. I have started writing a hobby harness with a web interface where I would like to support this "ACP proxy" mode natively, and also to make the models aware of different devices in some way and "move" work between them.
- xrd 1mo ago
  I basically do this, tmux via tailscale. But, I often get inspiration and want to jump into a webapp from my phone, or review. I've been playing with pi and the remote webui extension. I don't love it; it has a lot of chrome that obscures what I want to do. I just want a simple way to review the progress so far, and keep tweaking with minimal setup. Then, jump back into tmux when I'm back on my computer. Thanks for your comments.
arw0n 1mo ago
I found both Tmux and Herdr to be insufferable, but they work for many people. I'm not in the business of managing 17 agents at the same time (I have 1 to 4 agents I manage, those might have sub-agents, but I'm not a micro-manager). The hand-off problem itself is trivial, it is a txt file that needs to be sent around, but I haven't seen any good tools giving good UX for it yet. 1. Means running somewhere that is not your computer. I just use my personal server for this. 2. Should probably be done in the repo. Just add the context file in a dedicated sub directory. At this point I think these kinds of artefacts are part of the SE process, and fair to check into source control. 3. Can be done by letting the TUI write/draft emails via MCP. 4. Can be done with something like OpenCode or PiCode, which just allows you to switch in their TUI interface. Beware though, context has to be re-ingested, so it costs a couple of cents. But again, in the end context is just a file. By switching models, you are paying the price of not having any context cached, but for manual steps that's usually not super relevant. Just be careful about adding these kinds of things to automated workflows, as a cost like 25c can add up when agents run amok.

by xrd 1mo ago

ds_opseeker 1mo ago

Sounds like you want an orchestration. Let's assume handoff happens when one "agent" finishes its work on one task, i.e. "submit a PR". At that point you want to exit the agent/clear context etc (any context the next actor needs should be in the handoff artifact). And the orchestrator calls the next agent with the artifact. Claude can do this with subagents. If you want to get more serious, I'd look at "durable workflows" and check out what the pi people have to say: https://earendil-works.github.io/absurd/ https://earendil-works.github.io/absurd/ https://earendil-works.github.io/absurd/patterns/pi-ai-agent/ https://earendil-works.github.io/absurd/patterns/pi-ai-agent... you should also look at dbos https://www.dbos.dev/ https://www.dbos.dev/ And then do a search for these terms on HN and get some idea of their shortcomings vs a 'real' orchestration tool like Airflow or Dagster

YZF 1mo ago

I do this all the time in my workflow. Use any harness. Ask it to create a markdown file with the information required for the handoff. Use that downstream. Keep a "repo" of those markdown files. Are you trying to orchestrate or manage this sort of process?

itishappy 1mo ago

The session is "just" the raw chat history in it's entirety (human and agent) and can be disseminated as such. This is what enables swapping between models, you simply send the whole context. Not sure how others do it, but opencode stores sessions in a sqlite db and you can extract them and share them as needed. https://opencode.ai/docs/cli/#export https://opencode.ai/docs/cli/#export Pro-tip: Building your own extremely minimal harness takes about 15m and is both fun and enlightening. Agents are unsurprisingly quite good at it, but ask them to walk you through it step by step.

dbmikus 1mo ago
For a truly "handoff-able" session, you also need to store the data it was working on. In most cases, these are the git patches
gf000 1mo ago
Another common format is `jsonl`, basically a json object per line containing a message

speed_spread 1mo ago

Hermes has /handoff to go from cli or desktop to IM, possibly other ways.

izgorodin 1mo ago

[flagged]

dbmikus 1mo ago

I'm working on this at my startup, amika.dev Open core is here: https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika We're designing it like a meta-harness actually. The goal is to let users put any agent(s) (Claude, Codex, Pi, OpenCode) on a sandbox on any computer (local, K8S pod, cloud VPS, sandbox provider, etc.) And then be able to interact with the agent(s) from anywhere: terminal, phone, web, or load them into the Codex, Claude, or Cursor apps Yapped a bit about this "multi-surface" agents idea last week: https://x.com/dbmikus/status/2087993214246469639 https://x.com/dbmikus/status/2087993214246469639 Under the hood, I think of part of our tech like mashing together Tailscale and Firecracker. The edges are rough right now, but if you kick the tires, I appreciate any feedback! (my email is dylan@amika.dev) And besides what we're building, there are cool projects like Amp Orbs, YC's QM harness, etc.

gf000 1mo ago

Not really solving all your cases, but I found tmux (or herdr) on a home server works pretty well. I just ssh into my home server and continue where I left off with the same claude/opencode open. On a longer term, I think "assistant" style harnesses might help here, like vellum.ai. I no longer use that, but I asked it to create an ACP proxy through iroh (basically tailscale but on the application layer), and it managed to control claude on another device of mine. A friend did similar stuff with tailscale. I have started writing a hobby harness with a web interface where I would like to support this "ACP proxy" mode natively, and also to make the models aware of different devices in some way and "move" work between them.

xrd 1mo ago
I basically do this, tmux via tailscale. But, I often get inspiration and want to jump into a webapp from my phone, or review. I've been playing with pi and the remote webui extension. I don't love it; it has a lot of chrome that obscures what I want to do. I just want a simple way to review the progress so far, and keep tweaking with minimal setup. Then, jump back into tmux when I'm back on my computer. Thanks for your comments.

arw0n 1mo ago

I found both Tmux and Herdr to be insufferable, but they work for many people. I'm not in the business of managing 17 agents at the same time (I have 1 to 4 agents I manage, those might have sub-agents, but I'm not a micro-manager). The hand-off problem itself is trivial, it is a txt file that needs to be sent around, but I haven't seen any good tools giving good UX for it yet. 1. Means running somewhere that is not your computer. I just use my personal server for this. 2. Should probably be done in the repo. Just add the context file in a dedicated sub directory. At this point I think these kinds of artefacts are part of the SE process, and fair to check into source control. 3. Can be done by letting the TUI write/draft emails via MCP. 4. Can be done with something like OpenCode or PiCode, which just allows you to switch in their TUI interface. Beware though, context has to be re-ingested, so it costs a couple of cents. But again, in the end context is just a file. By switching models, you are paying the price of not having any context cached, but for manual steps that's usually not super relevant. Just be careful about adding these kinds of things to automated workflows, as a cost like 25c can add up when agents run amok.