Harness Agent Development Lifecycle
Ship AI agents with the confidence you ship code
Harness Agent DLC is the development lifecycle for AI agents, extending the pipelines, governance, and controls you already trust for code to the full agent lifecycle.
Sources: Gartner · S&P Global Market Intelligence · IBM
Agents skip the guardrails your code already has
Same input, different actions
An agent decides its own tools and actions on every run, so a test that passes once is no guarantee it passes again.
Not a bad week. A headline.
An agent that exposes data or acts without authorization becomes a compliance event, not just an incident.
Many moving, independent parts
Prompts, skills, tools, and models evolve on their own, with no single system tracking version or provenance across them.
Reconciled by hand, tool by tool
Evals, cost dashboards, firewalls, and scanners each track agents their own way, so shipping safely means checking every tool by hand.
One platform for the entire agent development lifecycle
Harness Agent DLC runs agents through the same stages you already run for software. Every agent inherits your CI/CD pipelines, policies, and audit trail, with security woven through every stage.
Build
Harness CI
Agents build into artifacts, like any other service.
Test
AI Evals AI Test Automation
Quality gates on every agent or model change.
Store
Artifact Registry
Versions every prompt, model, and dependency.
Deploy
Agent Deployments
Ships through governed pipelines to Kubernetes.
Operate
AI Configs AI Cost Management
Swaps models and prompts, and tracks spend.
Govern
AI Asset Catalog
Every agent gets an owner, scorecard, and audit trail.
Woven across every stage
Secure, shift left and shield right
The layer beneath it all
AgentTrace, telemetry and one audit trail
Built like software, proven before it ships
Just another service. Agents build into artifacts through Harness CI, the same pipeline that builds everything else you ship.
50+ built-in eval metrics. Score faithfulness, safety, and task completion out of the box, or add your own custom metric.
Catches drift before users do. One eval system scores pre-deploy tests and live production traffic, not a one-time check.
Plain-language test assertions. AI Test Automation checks live conversations without hand-written test scripts.
A release you can trust, ready to ship
Every artifact versioned. Prompts, models, tools, and skills are tracked with provenance and dependencies, not scattered across repos and notebooks.
Reproducible promotions. Promote the complete release definition of an agent with confidence that what you tested is what ships.
Canary releases, instant rollback. Roll out progressively and roll back instantly on the same pipeline, instead of an all-or-nothing push.
One release, not three workflows. Backend, frontend, and agent ship together as a single release instead of three disconnected deployments.
Change safely, and know who owns it
Swap models without shipping code. Compare cost, latency, and quality across model variants at runtime, then ramp traffic to the best one.
Spend visible per agent. See what each agent and model costs, attribute it to the owning team, and set limits before spend exceeds budget.
Every agent has an owner. The AI Asset Catalog auto-discovers agents as they spin up and links each to an owner and a scorecard.
Trace blast radius before you change anything. Chart parent-child lineage across every asset, so you know what breaks and who to page before you touch it.
Security woven into every stage
Primitive scanning and AI-BOM. Scan skills, prompts, and models for risk before they ever ship, and capture every model, tool, and dependency an agent was built with.
AI testing on the OWASP Top 10. Run agents against adversarial inputs and policy violations across the OWASP Top 10 for LLM and agentic AI risk.
Agent discovery and AI firewall. Map agents as they spin up, then enforce policy at runtime against prompt injection and tool misuse.
One audit trail, build to production. OPA policies, approval gates, and audit trails apply to every agent pipeline, so every action stays accountable.
Works with the stack you already run
Harness plugs into your model providers, agent runtimes, coding tools, cloud, and CI/CD. Bring agents into a governed lifecycle without ripping anything out.
Frequently asked questions
Harness Agent DLC is the development lifecycle for AI agents. It runs agents through the same six stages as software, build, test, store, deploy, operate, and govern, on the platform, pipelines, and governance you already use. Every agent inherits the same CI/CD, OPA policy enforcement, RBAC, and audit trail as the rest of your software.
Traditional software is deterministic: the same input produces the same output, and a stack trace explains failures. Agents do not follow that logic. The underlying model decides its own tools and actions on every run, so the same agent can take a different action on identical input, with no trace of why. A test that passes once is no guarantee it passes again, so the standard playbook for catching and fixing bugs does not transfer.
No. Agents build into artifacts through Harness CI, ship through Harness CD, and are governed by the OPA policies and RBAC already in your pipelines. An eval gate, a deployment approval, and a security check are stages in one pipeline, not three separate integrations to maintain.
Security is woven into every stage rather than added as a seventh one. Shift-left controls scan and test agents before they ship: primitive scanning for misconfigurations, an AI-BOM of every model and dependency, and AI testing against the OWASP Top 10 for LLM and agentic AI risk. Shield-right controls protect agents already running: agent discovery maps how agents connect, and an AI firewall enforces policy against prompt injection and tool misuse.
An eval tool, a cost dashboard, a firewall, and a scanner each define their own model of an agent, their own access control, and their own audit log, so answering whether an agent is safe to ship means reconciling several systems by hand. Harness Agent DLC gives every stage one model of an agent, one access control layer, and one audit trail, on the same pipelines you already run for software.
Ready to ship agents with the same confidence as your code?
See Harness Agent DLC run against your own pipelines: build, test, store, deploy, operate, and govern agents on one platform. Start free, or get a guided walkthrough.