Alibaba Cloud open-sources Better Harness for AI coding agents

Alibaba Cloud's AI coding platform Qoder has open-sourced Better Harness on GitHub. It's a tool for analyzing and improving AI coding agent workflows by connecting engineering practices with evaluation models.

Better Harness checks if agents actually use their abilities to complete tasks, not just if the abilities exist. Each finding must include traceable evidence, user impact, and fix scope. The project uses a three-layer open-source structure covering engineering practices, evaluation models, and runnable implementations.

The tool collects three types of evidence independently. Its first internal evaluation covered 30 real GitHub projects. It works with popular coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Qoder, and Cursor, giving developers a unified framework for quality assessment and improvement.