Harness Acquires Augment Code Assets to Link AI Coding With Deployment

Harness provides an autonomous, artificial intelligence-driven platform for developers and operations teams, or DevOps, across the software delivery lifecycle. According to the company, the platform automates building, testing and deploying code across cloud, container and on-premises environments using AI agents that generate workflows from plain text, catch vulnerabilities, test code and troubleshoot production issues.

The assets Harness is taking over include Cosmos, Augment Code's cloud-based AI code development platform, which coordinates multiple agents for software engineering teams, as well as the Auggie command-line interface products, the Code Context Engine and related technologies. Cosmos will become Harness Cosmos Software Factory and take on a defined role: automating engineering work from idea to code.

Harness co-founder and Chief Executive Jyoti Bansal told SiliconANGLE that turning an idea into code and taking that code to production are today two separate jobs, with someone manually steering every step in between. He said Harness has spent years helping large enterprises get code safely to production, while Augment Code has spent years on the path from an idea to good code.

In the combined setup, developers use Cosmos to prompt and coordinate AI agents that generate and maintain code at scale through natural-language prompts, working on the code itself and refining the engineering work central to their craft, according to the report. Harness's existing agents for software delivery, security testing, runtime protection and cost management then handle the rest of the DevOps pipeline from work to production. The company said this creates an "idea to deployment" agent-to-agent experience.

Bansal said the only thing that changes for customers after the acquisition is choice. Customers can keep using their preferred coding tools, adopt Harness Cosmos, or use both, he said. He added that code assistance, generation and maintenance now share context, which from an engineer's point of view means testing and security no longer sit on a separate dashboard but are part of the work itself.

Augment Code co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Igor Ostrovsky said the company set out to bring AI to the entire software development lifecycle, beginning with context-aware coding, and that joining Harness is the next step toward that vision. He said the two companies together can make engineering work increasingly automatic, with engineers stepping in only where judgment really matters.