Harness announced Thursday that it acquired Augment Code’s Cosmos software factory, Auggie CLI and Code Context Engine, along with the team behind them, for an undisclosed amount. The deal adds autonomous coding agents to Harness’s existing software delivery platform, which already handles testing and deployment.According to Harness, Cosmos will become the Harness Cosmos Software Factory Agent, with plans to connect Augment’s codebase understanding to Harness’s delivery history. The integration would allow coding agents to use previous deployment failures when making changes and receive feedback from downstream systems when those changes fail validation. Cosmos is available today, but those capabilities have not shipped.“AI’s impact on software will not be measured by how much code it generates, but by how much valuable software reaches customers.”“AI’s impact on software will not be measured by how much code it generates, but by how much valuable software reaches customers,” said Harness founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal. The acquisition follows the company’s research into the AI velocity paradox, which found that faster code generation was putting additional strain on testing and release processes that had not kept pace.Inside the Cosmos factoryCosmos takes a requirement or bug report through to a pull request, with agents writing and testing code inside isolated VMs. They can also pick up failed checks and review comments on an existing PR, using feedback from earlier rounds to make further changes.Teams can fork and customize agents for their own workflows, while Augment’s Code Context Engine retrieves relevant codebase context as they work.“We set out to bring AI to the entire software development lifecycle, starting with context-aware coding,” said Igor Ostrovsky, Augment Code’s co-founder and CTO, describing engineering work that becomes increasingly autonomous “with engineers stepping in only where judgment really matters.”“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.”Where humans still approveDevelopers still approve and merge changes, although Bansal wrote that teams can decide which work agents handle on their own and where a person has to review or approve it. Cosmos remains accessible through Augment’s existing site while Harness works on bringing it into the broader platform.Turning failures into fixesHarness plans to connect Augment’s Code Context Engine to its Software Delivery Knowledge Graph, which would give Cosmos access to deployment history and security findings when working on code changes. The integration would also let Harness’s downstream agents use repository context to investigate failures and determine what needs fixing.“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.”“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,” Bansal said. A failed deployment could then be sent back to Cosmos for another revision, with the failure context passed to the coding agent rather than requiring a developer to diagnose the issue and create a separate task.The company has not set a release date for the integration or explained how context will be exchanged between the Code Context Engine and the delivery graph, including how agents will retrieve relevant information from each system.Who controls agent permissionsHarness plans to bring Cosmos under the identity and policy controls of its Agent Harness but has not explained how permissions will work across the two systems, a gap that stands out as the industry moves toward agent identity, with Microsoft giving its Copilot agents identities of their own.Cosmos already runs agents in isolated VMs with configurable review checkpoints, although it’s unclear what production data they will be allowed to access or which downstream actions they can take. Those limits deserve scrutiny, particularly after coding agents exposed more than 13,000 screenshots through routine workflows without an attacker ever gaining access.The post Harness bought Augment’s coding agents. The best feature hasn’t shipped yet. appeared first on The New Stack.