Agent Orchestrator, a local-first Harness Engineering control plane
I have spent a long time working in an XP/TDD style, so when AI coding tools became useful enough for real work, I adopted them quickly. The first bottleneck I hit was not code generation, it was verification: AI could write code and tests quickly, but I was still the person reviewing implementations, clicking through flows, checking logs, inspecting database state, and deciding whether the result was actually correct. That pushed me to move validation further left. Before implementation, AI had to produce test plans. After implementation, it had to execute those plans too: drive the…
In plain words
Agent Orchestrator is a local-first control plane for orchestrating AI agents in software development workflows. It automates verification and testing of AI-generated code by managing test planning, implementation, and execution—including browser automation, log inspection, and database validation. The tool is designed for developers using AI coding assistants who want to shift verification left by having agents autonomously validate their own work, execute test plans, and iterate on fixes before human review.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
I have spent a long time working in an XP/TDD style, so when AI coding tools became useful enough for real work, I adopted them quickly. The first bottleneck I hit was not code generation, it was verification: AI could write code and tests quickly, but I was still the person reviewing implementations, clicking through flows, checking logs, inspecting database state, and deciding whether the result was actually correct. That pushed me to move validation further left. Before implementation, AI had to produce test plans. After implementation, it had to execute those plans too: drive the browser, inspect logs, check DB state, create tickets for failures, fix them, and retest until the output converged. Auth9 (https://github.com/c9r-io/auth9) became the proving ground for that method. Once it was clearly working, I started building Agent Orchestrator so the process would not depend on me manually supervising every step. By mid-February, I was already using early Orchestrator-style automation inside Auth9. In mid-March, I used it during the highest-risk refactor so far: replacing the headless Keycloak setup with a native `auth9-oidc` engine. The core replacement landed over 3 days, and the same method and tooling helped converge the follow-up technical debt and complete the community OIDC Certification tests by the end of the month. That was the point where I became confident this was useful not only for greenfield work, but for governing high-risk change in a real system. At the time, "orchestration" was the word I cared most about, which is why the project got its name. Later, OpenAI's Harness Engineering framing gave me a better name for the broader shape of the work. The project today is a local-first Rust control plane for long-running agent workflows: YAML resources, SQLite-backed task state, machine-readable CLI output, structured logs, and guardrails around shell-based agents. - GitHub: https://github.com/c9r-io/orchestrator - Docs: https://docs.c9r.io - Auth9: https://github.com/c9r-io/auth9 - Install: `brew install c9r-io/tap/orchestrator` or `cargo install orchestrator-cli orchestratord` - License: MIT
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 26d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, March 2026
the whole month →
Switch from ChatGPT to Claude with import memory feature
AI · Mar 2026 · claude.com
