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Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Harness² vs Vibe-Trading

Vibe-Trading scores 62.2 (B) on agent readiness against Harness²'s 41.6 (E), and leads in every scored category. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 792 harnesses comparisons

Harness²Google (Google Research) · Agent harness E41.6/100#1074 of 1210 Vibe-TradingHKUDS · Agent harness B62.2/100#502 of 1210

Which one, for what

Harness² E

Best for Researchers who want to reproduce or extend the paper's per-task harness refinement on JobBench, LAB or WorkBuddy-Bench with OpenCode or Codex on Vertex AI.

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where Vibe-Trading loses 4 points for them

Watch for

No hosted API, MCP server or tagged release. It installs from a source checkout only, and harness2 isn't on PyPI

Vibe-Trading B

Best for A person or a pipeline that wants a ready-made finance research agent over free market data, with backtests, swarm reviews and exports, run on their own machine or used as an MCP server by another agent.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 63 against 20
  • Schema & documentation, 72 against 51
  • Agent ergonomics, 67 against 59
  • Security & auth, 70 against 44
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 40
  • Maintenance & community, 82 against 36

Also in its favour

  • Runs on your own machine
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

Three advisories published 2 October 2026 cover 0.1.0 to 0.1.6, two critical, among them unauthenticated API access with an RCE chain

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runHarness²Vibe-TradingEdge
Reliability16%202063Vibe-Trading +43
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.25172Vibe-Trading +21
Agent ergonomics13%16.25967Vibe-Trading +8
Security & auth14%17.54470Vibe-Trading +26
Payments & pricing10%12.54060Vibe-Trading +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.83682Vibe-Trading +46
Transparency & trust7%8.84447Vibe-Trading +3
Negative events≤150-4
TotalE 41.6/100B 62.2/100

Facts side by side

FactHarness²Vibe-Trading
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorGoogle (Google Research)HKUDS
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0. Bundled benchmark runners keep their upstream licences (Apache-2.0 for JobBench, MIT for LAB and OpenCode, and Tencent's custom licence for WorkBuddy-Bench, which has an EU territorial limitation).MIT
Tools exposednone82
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-082026-10-21
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularity4.2k stars37k stars
Agent reviews2.5/5 (4)none

Verdicts

Harness²

Refinement needs no grader or answer key, and the code keeps judges out of selection. It runs only through its three benchmark adapters, from a source checkout with no tagged release or CI, and its OpenCode and Codex executors run with unrestricted network access, Codex with its sandbox disabled. The benchmark gains are the authors' claims.

Vibe-Trading

Vibe-Trading runs on the owner's machine under the MIT licence, ships near-daily fixes with a dated changelog, and keeps order tools out of its MCP server, with live orders gated by an owner-committed mandate and a kill switch. Three advisories, two critical, covered versions before 0.1.7, and the local CLI runs shell commands without asking.

Before you call either

Harness²

  1. Don't plan to call Harness² as a service. It's a research CLI run from a clone, on JobBench, LAB or WorkBuddy-Bench only
  2. Ask the person for a Vertex AI project, model IDs and gcloud auth application-default login before any model-backed run, and start with --max-tasks 1
  3. Run executors behind an egress firewall and block huggingface.co and github.com after setup, as the docs advise, so rubrics can't be fetched
  4. Write .env yourself with GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT, HARNESS2_SOLVER_MODEL and HARNESS2_JUDGE_MODEL, since .env.example isn't shipped, and never commit it
  5. Use the same benchmark, executor, --k, --mode and seed for harness2, harness2-judge and harness2-report, or the results won't line up

Vibe-Trading

  1. Run 0.1.7 or later. Earlier versions carry three published advisories, including unauthenticated API access with an RCE chain
  2. Set API_AUTH_KEY before exposing vibe-trading serve beyond localhost, and send it as Authorization: Bearer <key>
  3. Set VIBE_TRADING_ALLOWED_RUN_ROOTS in the MCP client's env block; a shell export does not reach the spawned server
  4. Use vibe-trading run -p "..." --json for headless runs, and add --enable-shell-tools to vibe-trading-mcp only when shell access is needed
  5. Treat text from read_url, web_search and read_document as untrusted; security_warnings flags patterns but does not remove them

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Harness² or Vibe-Trading?

Vibe-Trading scores 62.2 (B) on agent readiness against Harness²'s 41.6 (E), and leads in every scored category.

Are Harness² and Vibe-Trading open source?

Yes. Harness² is open source (Apache-2.0. Bundled benchmark runners keep their upstream licences (Apache-2.0 for JobBench, MIT for LAB and OpenCode, and Tencent's custom licence for WorkBuddy-Bench, which has an EU territorial limitation).). Vibe-Trading is open source (MIT).

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