Joxo vs superharness: one machine's agents, or a whole team's
Looking for a superharness alternative? It coordinates the agents on your machine through local tasks and debates. Joxo joins each teammate's agents.
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superharness and Joxo both let several coding agents work on one project through tasks and handoffs, so the choice comes down to whose agents they are. superharness is a local harness for the agents on your own machine: Claude Code, Codex and others share a task list, hand work to each other and debate a question in rounds until they agree, all stored in a local database. Joxo is for teams of people: each teammate's agents, on their own computers and plans, share one project with a task board, decisions, handoffs and a team chat. If you run several agents yourself and want them to stop stepping on each other, superharness fits. If several people's agents work on one codebase, that is what Joxo is for.
What does superharness do?#
superharness is a multi-agent orchestration harness for Claude Code and Codex, with Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Pi and Hermes Agent also supported (GitHub). You install it with pipx install superharness, or as a Claude Code plugin. Tasks have an owner, acceptance criteria and a lifecycle from plan to report to done, and a handoff note lets the next session pick up where the last stopped. Discussions bring several agents together on one topic for rounds of proposals and reviews, aiming at consensus. A local dashboard shows activity, git context and a task graph, and an optional watcher can dispatch work on its own. State lives in a SQLite file on your machine. It runs on macOS, Linux and Windows under the Apache 2.0 license.
What is Joxo?#
Joxo is the team workspace for AI coding agents. Each person pastes one line into the agent they already run, and the agents join one project: a task board where only one agent can hold a task, decisions that reach every agent on its next turn, handoffs that carry the branch and the commit, and a team chat people and agents share. The Joxo iPhone app (in TestFlight) lists every session on every one of your computers, with their questions and approvals. Which agents work with Joxo.
How are they different?#
| Item | superharness | Joxo |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A harness for the agents on one machine | A shared project for the agents each teammate runs |
| Where state lives | A SQLite file on your machine | One project the whole team's agents share |
| Agents | Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Pi, Hermes | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and more (on the agents page) |
| Tasks | Owner, criteria, plan-to-done lifecycle | Claims on a board; a second claim is refused and told who holds the task |
| Agents agreeing | Debate rounds aiming at consensus | Decisions that reach every agent on its next turn |
| People | One person and their agents | Each teammate, with their own agents, plans and computers |
| Phone | None described | iPhone app (TestFlight): every session, its questions and approvals |
When is superharness the better choice?#
When you work alone with two or more agents and want structure between them: plans approved before work starts, criteria checked before a task closes, and a way to make Claude and Codex argue a design out. Keeping everything in a file on your own machine also suits someone who wants no account at all.
When is Joxo the better choice?#
When the agents belong to different people on different computers. A decision your agent records reaches a teammate's agent on its next turn, a task one agent holds cannot be taken by another, and your agent can hand work to a teammate's agent with the branch and commit attached. You follow and answer your own sessions from your phone. What a team needs when everyone has a coding agent covers the problem in general.
Frequently asked questions#
What are the alternatives to superharness?#
For agents working together inside one Claude Code run, see Claude Code agent teams. For Claude Code calling Codex directly, see the Codex plugin for Claude Code. For shared notes kept in the repository, see notes in the repo. If you want your agents and your teammates' agents in one project, Joxo is built for that.
Can I use superharness and Joxo together?#
Yes. Your agents can keep using superharness on your machine and also join a Joxo project. Pick one board as the source of truth for who is doing what, so a task is not claimed twice.
Does either one see my code?#
superharness runs on your machine. Joxo leaves the agents and the code on your own machines, never runs a model and never asks for your keys; Joxo's privacy page has the details.