ZOB Harness

ZOB Harness is an open-source, MIT-licensed governed agent harness built on top of Pi, the coding-agent platform. It transforms Pi from a single-session assistant into a supervised multi-agent factory system where teams of specialized agents communicate visibly, produce durable artifacts, and package successful workflows for reuse. The project is maintained by cgarrot on GitHub and reached v0.15.1 as of June 2026.

What It Is

ZOB Harness is an agent harness and factory framework for Pi. Where most agent tools optimize a single assistant session, ZOB optimizes the full agent factory loop: define a team topology, launch a run, observe agent communication, review artifacts, and convert a working workflow into a reusable factory that can drive the next class of work. The core abstraction is the ZAgent/ZTeam model — roles such as chief, scout, builder, and oracle coordinate through structured, parent-visible messages rather than hidden worker chat, keeping multi-agent work debuggable and auditable.

How the Agent Factory Loop Works

A ZOB run follows a deliberate lifecycle:

• Define a ZTeam manifest with role aliases, communication policy, and parent-visible rooms.
• Prepare startup kickoff files so each agent begins with bounded, scoped instructions.
• Launch one Pi session per ZAgent, optionally backed by persistent tmux windows.
• Coordinate with structured CONTEXT / ASK / EVIDENCE / URGENCY / BLOCKER messages between roles.
• Validate with checkpoints, sentinel gates, and oracle/no-ship review before any work is marked done.
• Package the successful workflow as a reusable manifest, launcher, kickoff set, workgraph, and validation ladder.

Artifacts under reports/<run_id>/ — manifests, kickoff files, workgraphs, status files, validation output, and oracle reports — are the source of truth, not the chat transcript.

Safety Model and Governance

ZOB is deliberately conservative. The safety posture is enforced by AGENTS.md, damage-control rules, a git policy file, a child-safety extension, and smoke scripts:

• No .env, private key, SSH, AWS, or credential reads.
• No destructive shell or git operations without explicit approval.
• No direct commits, pushes, tags, or force pushes by default; governed commits go through /zcommit or zob_zcommit_run only when explicitly authorized.
• Completion requires concrete artifacts, validation evidence, and oracle/no-ship review when required.
• Automated npm releases are handled by GitHub Actions via semantic-release, not by local agents.

Surface and Tooling

The harness exposes approximately 77 tools, 25 commands, 39 specialist agents, 24 skills, and 75 npm scripts. The core workflow for new users centers on a small set: /zmode to pick an operating mode (explore, plan, implement, oracle, factory, orchestrator), /goal and /todo for goal-linked work breakdown, /contract for six-part delegation handoffs, and /zcommit for governed commits. Advanced surfaces — live peer communications, worker pools, goal rooms, merge queues, mission control, ProjectDNA, and ZTeam/ZAgent factory scaffolds — are opt-in and experimental.

The Harness Intake factory allows ZOB to analyze another agent harness (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Aider, or a custom setup) and propose reusable ZOB teams and factory scaffolds from its docs, agents, skills, commands, and prompts, writing outputs to a quarantined generated-proposals/ directory without auto-activating them.

Update: v0.15.1

The latest release is v0.15.1, published on June 17, 2026. Notable recent additions include the Goal TODO ZPeer/ZTeam handoff runtime (introduced in 0.4.0), active context discovery via zob_context_search with optional ColGREP integration, an optional intent classifier supporting regex and model-backed routing, and the zob:context:doctor / zob:context:init / zob:context:query npm script family. The project self-describes as an early, conservative, governed harness and explicitly states it should not be described as unrestricted autonomy or a production deployment system.