A remote agent's harness is gated on a binary installed on the operator's machine
Author: meeveemCreated Sep 18, 2026Updated Sep 18, 2026
Severity: high for the kubernetes backend.
agent_discovery resolves harness availability with
available: resolved_path.is_some() — a lookup on the desktop's PATH. For a
provider-backed agent the harness runs in the pod, so the local check is
meaningless, yet it gates the UI: an agent whose harness is only present in the
container image shows "not detected on this computer" and cannot be configured.
This is worse on macOS: a GUI app does not inherit the shell PATH, so
/opt/homebrew/bin is absent and Homebrew-installed harnesses are invisible
until the operator runs launchctl setenv PATH ….
Expected: for backend.type === "provider", harness availability should not
depend on the desktop PATH — the image is the substrate.
Source: block/buzz