xah

What does it stand for?

eXtensible Agent Harness—or perhaps “Not Another Harness!”

How is it pronounced?

The a is silent.

Should I use xah?

xah is for people comfortable with Python development—directly or via agents—who want fine-grained control over how their agents behave.

Who might find it useful?

xah may be useful if you want to:

• Work with locally hosted models, whose tool discipline may not always be reliable.
• Add custom tools—for example, ensure the agent can only run the right version of Python.
• Add validation that blocks misbehavior even when prompts asking the agent not to do something have failed.
• Add tools that aren't typically available in existing harnesses.
• Subclass or extend existing tools, validation workflows, or subagents.
• Extend agents to non-coding workflows.

Who is xah not for?

• If you use frontier models exclusively and they already behave roughly how you want, a mainstream off-the-shelf agent may be a better fit.
• If you do not want to work in Python or maintain code-level customizations, xah's main strength—extending the harness in Python—may not be useful to you.

Why does xah exist?

There are two main motivations for xah: extensibility, and adapting ACP for agents beyond coding.

Extensibility

Existing harnesses can be limiting when a developer—or an agent working with them—needs to develop tools in a fine-grained, debuggable way. Common approaches tend to fall into a few groups:

• Instructions: add more context in files such as AGENTS.md or skills, then hope the agent follows it.
• Configuration: set coarse-grained options for behavior and permissions.
• Plugin systems: gain more power, but learn a separate workflow; plugins can also be difficult to debug when they run through the agent.

These approaches have their place, but they aren't a substitute for being able to change the harness directly. xah makes it straightforward to develop and debug custom tools and validation as Python code. A prompt can ask an agent not to misbehave; code can block it from doing so.

xah is built on Pydantic AI and Pydantic Deep Agents.

Adapting ACP for non-coding agents

The Agent Client Protocol (ACP) is designed to connect coding agents with clients such as editors and IDEs. It provides a standard communication interface, rather than a bespoke integration for every agent and client. ACP is not an agent-to-agent coordination protocol.

xah begins with the familiar coding-agent use case—an IDE, terminal UI, or similar client—and explores using that client experience with agents for other kinds of work, too.

Get started

Install xah from PyPI and start the server:

pip install xah
xah

For an ephemeral run, use uvx xah. The server needs an ACP client for the interactive interface. See the quick start and PyCharm or Zed setup instructions, then work through the tutorials to extend xah.

Documentation

Visit the xah documentation for setup, ACP client configuration, tutorials, and agent data and skills.