Microsoft shipped a batteries-included agent Harness for .NET and Python — one call gets you compaction, todos, file memory, and approval rules
Released July 22, the Agent Framework Harness bundles the tool-calling loop with iteration limits, per-call history persistence, context-window compaction, persistent todo/plan tracking, durable file memory across turns, progressively-loaded skills, web search, standing tool-approval rules with heuristic auto-approval, and OpenTelemetry. Adoption is `create_harness_agent()` with `FoundryChatClient` in Python or the `AsHarnessAgent()` extension on `IChatClient` in .NET — you supply a chat client, instructions via `ChatOptions`, and optional tools. Every feature is on by default and individually removable through `HarnessAgentOptions`, which makes it a useful reference implementation even if you never adopt it: it's a checklist of what a production harness owns.
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