Zenith

What Zenith does

Zenith targets premature completion: agents that stop before the task is really done. One orchestrator session reads the task state every turn and decides whether to spawn workers and testers, register reusable skills, replan or stop. The coding agent that plays orchestrator can be Claude Code, Codex or Hermes, and the supported set is defined in zenith/src/zenith_harness/providers.py.

The repository holds the harness and the Intelligent Internet technical report behind it. In the report, five harness designs were tested across eight long-horizon tasks. RALPH, which reopens the gap between project state and the original requirement in every new session, was the strongest simple baseline but is expensive and has no principled stopping rule. The report says Zenith achieved the best mean rank at less than half of RALPH's per-task cost. You can ask Claude Code or Codex to install it from the README, or install manually with uv, initialize a workspace pointing at your target app, and add the ACP adapters.

Key features

• Orchestrator session that spawns workers and testers, registers skills, replans and decides when to stop
• Runs on Claude Code, Codex or Hermes over MCP and ACP
• Workspace init per target app with uv run zenith init
• Agent-driven install prompt in the README that also creates a /zenith skill
• Technical report with a five-design comparison on eight long-horizon tasks

When to use it

• Running a multi-day build with Hermes as the orchestrator and independent verification
• Preventing an agent from declaring a large task finished too early
• Reproducing or extending the harness comparison from the technical report

Who it is for: Developers running long, multi-step agent projects who need a stopping and verification discipline.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

Hermes is one of three coding agents Zenith can run as its orchestrator, so it is a general harness with Hermes support.

How to install Zenith

These commands are copied from the project's README. Check the repository for the latest steps before you run them.

cd zenith
uv sync
uv run zenith --help

Requirements: Python 3.11+, uv, Node.js 22+ with npm, and Claude Code, Codex or Hermes. ACP adapters are installed globally with npm for the agents you want Zenith to run.

FAQ