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Why a harness, not a framework One app, start to finish The convention that does the heavy lifting A library, not a demo Keeping your agent within the boundaries Growing past one agent Governed by construction Where the same agent ends up Next steps Resources TL;DR — Building an agent is mostly plumbing: tools, state, guardrails, scaling from one agent to many. CUGA (pip install cuga), short for Configurable Generalist Agent, the Agent Harness for the Enterprise from IBM handles that, so you write just a tool list and a prompt. We built two-dozen single-file apps to prove it. Read one end to end here, then see how the same agent runs sovereign and governed in production without a rewrite.
Most agentic apps start with a week of plumbing before the agent does anything useful. You pick a framework, wire up a model client, write tool adapters, build some way to stream state to a UI, and somewhere in there you also decide what the agent is actually for. The interesting part arrives last.
CUGA inverts that. It's the open-source agent harness from IBM that handles the planning, the execution loop, the tool calls, and the state plumbing for you. What's left is the part that's actually yours: which tools the agent can reach, and what you tell it to do. To show what that feels like in practice, we built cuga-apps: two dozen small, working apps, each a single FastAPI file wrapping one CugaAgent, from a movie recommender to an IBM Cloud architecture advisor. They exist to be read and copied.You can click through the live gallery.
