Paul Sawers reports that AWS released Strands Harness as open source, a general-purpose AI agent layered on its Strands Agents SDK that bundles file, shell, and web tools with built-in context management, memory, persistent sessions, prompt caching, and delegation, most of which runs on the developer’s own machine rather than AWS infrastructure. AWS benchmarked the harness across six agent tasks and says it averaged 45% cheaper per task than Claude Code and Codex with broadly comparable accuracy, though the margin falls to 28% once DeepSeek’s harness is folded in, crediting context defaults that truncate large tool output, compact context past a threshold, and recover from overflow. The article details the commercial shape of the release: model calls default to Amazon Bedrock but can be switched to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or Ollama in one line, and AWS offers AgentCore as an optional managed hosting layer built by the same team, giving the company a route from the open-source project to its paid service.
AWS open-sources Strands Harness, an agent it says undercuts Claude Code and Codex
Paul Sawers reports that AWS released Strands Harness as open source, a general-purpose AI agent layered on its Strands Agents SDK that bundles file, shell, and web tools with built-in context management, memory, persistent sessions, prompt caching, and delegation, most of which runs on the developer's own machine rather than AWS infrastructure. AWS benchmarked the harness across six agent tasks and says it averaged 45% cheaper per task than Claude Code and Codex with broadly comparable accuracy, though the margin falls to 28% once DeepSeek's harness is folded in, crediting context defaults that truncate large tool output, compact context past a threshold, and recover from overflow. The article details the commercial shape of the release: model calls default to Amazon Bedrock but can be switched to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or Ollama in one line, and AWS offers AgentCore as an optional managed hosting layer built by the same team, giving the company a route from the open-source project to its paid service.
Source: The New Stack