YC Just Open-Sourced Its Multiplayer Harness
BBetter Stack
Computing/SoftwareSmall Business/StartupsInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00do you remember when a new javascript framework would be released every week well the same thing
00:00:04is happening again but with agent harnesses and this time the guys that usually throw money around
00:00:09have actually picked up a keyboard and wrote some code well actually claude probably did it but
00:00:14startup accelerator y combinator have released their own agent harness qm and they call it a
00:00:19multiplayer agent harness for work in slack and on the web and it does have some interesting
00:00:24features plus it's specifically designed for startups so if you run a company that makes zero
00:00:29profit then this may be the tool for you so what actually is qm if you've read through the github
00:00:39repo you've probably come away with more questions and answers because it does a pretty terrible job
00:00:44of explaining itself the word harness makes it sound like another clawed code something you install on
00:00:49your laptop and run in your terminal it's actually a full stack web application that companies
00:00:54deploy onto their own infrastructure and everyone in the org gets their own isolated workspace on it
00:01:00underneath that you've got a headless backend running the agent loops and postgres holding
00:01:05the session history so none of it lives on your machine it plugs into slack so people can use it
00:01:10wherever they already work or you can drive it directly from the web ui so if you want to set
00:01:15it up once and forget about it you can do that and if you want to stay up to date with the latest
00:01:19tools then subscribe to better stack so why would you even use this well let's break it down qm runs
00:01:26in the cloud not on your machine that means the agent and the tool calls all happen off device and you
00:01:32can access it on any device that connects to the web and every workspace gets its own container with its
00:01:38own storage attached so anything the agent installs stays installed get it to set up a python environment
00:01:44on monday and it's still there on friday along with the files and anything it cloned so each workspace
00:01:50is a real machine that keeps its own state next up is shared context you can create a project and add
00:01:56team members so you can share memory files apps and connectors between the organization that means you
00:02:02can set things up once and everyone benefits by default everyone gets a personal space which is effectively
00:02:09a project set to private so you can choose to set up only things you have access to and safely configure
00:02:15things like credentials without sharing them however if you do want multiple team members to have access
00:02:20to the same tools files or credentials that is also possible the web ui actually does a terrible job of
00:02:26telling you which context you're in with basically nothing on screen letting you know where you're configuring
00:02:32things against you can see here i click my shared project and in files i get a small pill to tell
00:02:37me i'm uploading to that project but in other tabs i see no indicator at all i would expect to see a
00:02:43persistent ui element to tell me which context i'm in but i'm sure that can be added soon the next benefit
00:02:49is harnesses if you do really like the way a certain harness works like a clawed code for example
00:02:54you can configure that to run inside qm you can see here the default harness is pi but i can switch to clawed
00:03:01and i'll be running the exact same clawed code harness i'm used to but in a cloud environment
00:03:06getting clawed code into that list actually took a little bit of digging and admin decides which harnesses
00:03:11everyone is allowed to pick and out of the box you only get the one your deployment booted with
00:03:16so my drop down started with just pi and nothing else there's no control for it anywhere in the admin
00:03:21panel so i had to set it with an api call that's a put at the harnesses endpoint with the ids of the
00:03:27two harnesses i want and after refresh they both show up the next benefit is that it has a really tiny
00:03:32tool surface now this is something that i really liked the agent only gets seven tools execute read
00:03:38write publish memory history and background everything else it does is just a shell command
00:03:43inside its own sandbox so instead of wiring up a pile of mcp servers hoping the model picks the right
00:03:49one you can just hand it a machine and let it work the way you would it's the same approach that
00:03:53claude code takes and it's nice to see that this is built at the core of the design so how do you let
00:03:58an agent loose on company data without it going badly wrong there's an org wide setting for that
00:04:03with three levels on strict just about every tall call pauses and waits for a human to approve it auto
00:04:09is the default and it runs a classifier over external data and tool results before they reach the model
00:04:16and on dangerous there's no screening and nothing pauses a team can tighten that for their own scope but
00:04:21they can't loosen it past what the org picked there's also a command policy that applies whatever posture
00:04:27you're on so things like recursive deletes and destructive sql get blocked even on dangerous
00:04:33mode you'd want something like that before putting an agent in front of the whole company
00:04:36and it's not something you get when everyone runs their own agents locally overall i can see qm
00:04:42being a powerful tool for teams having shared access to company documentation because as an admin you can
00:04:47configure fine-grained access to external tools through credentials choose to include files or
00:04:52memory on how to run various processes you can even create shared skills that anyone in your project can
00:04:58access so rather than isolated setups like we have today with our cli tools this allows organizations
00:05:04to benefit from everyone's hard work personally i think it's worth a look it's already gained 13 000
00:05:09stars on github but i would say there's still much to be done about the ui and ux to be fair to the
00:05:14developers the project is only two weeks old so it literally is not mature however the potential here
00:05:18is huge it's open source and you can control and tweak absolutely everything including changing the
00:05:24source code if needed so you can check it out on the github repo linked in the description
00:05:29and if you enjoyed that don't forget to subscribe to better stack and i'll see you in the next one