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Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness

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Re: Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness

#31

Post by jayphen »

mettamage wrote: post #13

So… What is a harness? People have been talking about it and couldn’t glean what it is

AI models on their own are raw, undirected, and inherently probabilistic. A "harness" acts as a control layer wrapped around the model, designed to steer it toward deterministic outcomes. It achieves this by equipping the model with actionable tools like web search or file I/O, and by orchestrating an evaluation loop that runs until an acceptable result is produced. (various analogies work here - an astronaut and a space suit, a rocket and the launch pad/mission control, okay I'm out of analogies that aren't car engines)

You can see this in practice by looking at the leaked Claude Code source code. It is a harness around Anthropic's model built for writing code. It relies on heavily engineered (and sometimes brittle) steering mechanisms. These range from highly specific situational prompts to deterministic, hard-coded logic that executes based on the model's output.

Getting a harness right is incredibly hard and feels like whack-a-mole at times.

Re: Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness

#33

Post by lostmsu »

pohl wrote: post #30
lostmsu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory model? I would not want agent to remember previous conversations.

Ever? You would not want to accumulate any useful context at all?

Maybe in the future but with the current models I found the constantly accessible memories to be an impediment. I don't want models to record and repeat mistakes or suboptimal strategies.

Re: Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness

#34

Post by QuercusMax »

lostmsu wrote: post #33
pohl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever? You would not want to accumulate any useful context at all?

Maybe in the future but with the current models I found the constantly accessible memories to be an impediment. I don't want models to record and repeat mistakes or suboptimal strategies.

Gemini (just in the browser) has been really bad about conflating a bunch of similar projects. It remembers "oh, you have a home server that does XYZ", so my new home server that's doing ZYX instead must be the same system.

Re: Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness

#35

Post by throwaway290 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #22
throwaway290 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that is the first thing you learn humanises the username behind the keyboard The username is macOS26. The name is "Agent!". As in "Agentic AI for your entire Mac Desktop". All commits are made by this entity. Until someone here told me there is a real guy behind it I sincerely gotta say, it looks like there's no human behind the keyboard and actually there's no keyboard at all. Combined with cancer message…

> Combined with cancer message on top it made me think some LLM "agent" is trying different tricks because it was prompted to achieve maximum stars and forks. I feel shitty for saying this but how not to be cynical because literally that's what we degraded to thanks to "ai". AI might increase the volume of shitty things on the internet, but it's not like GitHub accounts weren't anonymous before AI, and it's not like…

An anonymous account isn't the same as bot account. Number of obvious bot accounts jumped 1000% in the last 4 years or so.

Re: Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness

#38

Post by macOS26 »

Hello!

I am the creator of Agent! macOS26.4+, and many won't know this but I have been coding AI apps and related tools from scratch for the past 3 years. I wanted to build something specifically for Mac but at an Agentic level.

I'll remove the stars and forks from the banners. The ribbons are emojois. To raise awareness, I have stage 2 (T2) bladder Cancer. I have been extremely sick the past two weeks. Agent was created a month ago. But most of the work that was done in the past 3 years has been applied to Agent.

If you want to be completely save, Agent does run on a macOS VM, but without any help from Apple Intelligence which runs various things locally. Some parts of Apple AI like Triage/Mediator are experimental.

I chose macOS26 because no one else claimed it and wanted to make it clear what version of macOS the user needed. You'd be surprised how many people still asked if it ran on 10.14 Mojave.

Re: Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness

#39

Post by macOS26 »

For those wondering about Priv. Agent is built on least priv. It will Run TCC related tasks locally and each app that is being automated required consent from the user. same with automating Safari + user must check a few boxes in Developer tools for Safari. Then there's shell scripting which the preferred route is the Launch Agent which the user approves along with the Launch Daemon. If the Launch Agent is not available, shell scripts run locally. AgentScripts within in swift also run locally in the app.

Anything priv. runs through the Launch Daemon. This is mostly used for software updates. Lately when creating a dmg using hdiutil, I have seen Agent securely ask for the the password and not use the launch daemon.

The Daemon was created first as a test to see what would happen if an LLM had access to one. And under that mode it knew about 50 things it could run as an administrator of the computer. It was never ran in that state. and its 3-4 layers of access were created.

The user can turn of the Launch Daemon and when this happens not only us the Daemon turned off, so are is access to the Launch Daemon tool. This model is used all over Agent! The user can turn off anything. I do plan to harden the Launch Agent and Launch Daemon on off access with Local Authentication and later a Pass-Key to prevent Agent! from turning it back on via things like Accessibility.

Re: Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness

#40

Post by macOS26 »

If anyone wants to know. My previous usernames are: 2020s SuperBox64, 2010s StarPlayrX, 2000s StarPlayr, 90s GoodTime, 80s Mirage, 80s WildFyre.

Been using Macs since 1984. Mac OS X since 2000, beta 1.

I really didn't think about humanizing the name. I just felt this flowed really well https://agent.macOS26.app and https://github.com/macOS26/agent

I do want to thank those who have taken the time to look at the app and who have left feedback!

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