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Most AI tools only act when you type. The Agent Harness gives your agent its own timeline: a small set of durable primitives it can combine to start work, wait for the right moment, run in the background, and come back with results — without you babysitting a terminal. A scheduled Harness task with Agent, session, delivery, and timing details

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The primitives

  • Run — execute one Agent job now. Synchronous when you want an answer, or --async to run in the background.
  • Task — a time trigger. “Every weekday at 9am”, “tonight”, “once after lunch.” Recurring (--cron) or one-off (--at).
  • Watch — a condition trigger. Wait for a PR review, a CI result, a deployment, a file, a log line, or a long-running process — then act.
  • Runs — the history. Inspect what happened, continue from a run, or cancel work when the situation changes.
All four share one run record, so a scheduled task and a watched condition produce the same kind of inspectable Agent Run. A Harness watch with its condition, Agent, session, and delivery details

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Ask in plain language

You don’t memorize flags. Ask your agent:
  • “Watch this PR and come back when there’s actionable review feedback.”
  • “Run the deployment check every weekday morning and post the summary here.”
  • “Start a separate investigation session for this incident, but report the conclusion to this channel.”
  • “If CI fails, summarize the logs; if it passes, tell me whether the PR is mergeable.”
The agent composes the Harness commands behind the scenes.

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Sessions and delivery

A Harness run can continue the conversation it came from — same thread, same context — or fork a fresh session for an independent investigation. When configured with a delivery target, it reports back to the originating thread, a parent channel, or the Workbench Inbox. A standalone definition can intentionally omit delivery; its result remains available in run history instead. For CLI-driven branching, use vibe agent run --fork-session <session-id>. Avibe creates a new Agent Session and asks the native backend to fork the source context. The fork keeps the source backend; --agent, --model, and --reasoning-effort are allowed only as same-backend overrides.

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Why it matters

This is the concrete, shipped step toward tension-driven agency: an agent that can leave the current chat turn, wait, return, branch, and keep records — instead of only reacting to your latest message. Self-initiated turns show up live in the Workbench.

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Reference

Full CLI for each primitive is in Commands: vibe agent, vibe task, vibe watch, and vibe runs.