A self-hosted switchboard for Codex, Claude Code, and friends

What it does

HarnessRouter Community Edition is a single Docker container that exposes one local API and web console for multiple agent harnesses—Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, Pi, and DeepSeek. You bring your own model-provider keys; the container handles sessions, streaming, file workspaces, cancellation, and failure handling without phoning home to a vendor cloud. It implements the Unified Harness Protocol (UHP), an open standard, and runs entirely on your own infrastructure.

The interesting bit

Instead of shipping agent CLIs inside the image, the container downloads them on first start for licensing reasons—Claude Code and Hermes cannot be redistributed, while Codex and others are open source. The more unusual trick is its security model: the container starts as root only so it can immediately drop to unprivileged users, spawning each agent session under its own Unix user. That means one agent literally cannot read another session’s files or environment, all without extra Docker privileges or seccomp profiles.

Key highlights

• Single container, ~700 MB download, no external account or telemetry required
• One API and console for five distinct agent backends
• No bundled models or trial keys; you plug in your own provider credentials
• Per-session Unix user isolation inside the container—no --privileged required
• Apache-2.0 licensed, implements the open UHP standard

Caveats

• First start is slow because it installs agent CLIs from upstream; if an install fails, that backend is simply missing with only a log line to tell you
• No provider key means nothing works—there is no free tier or bundled model hiding in the image
• Some backend/provider pairings fail silently (empty turn after a long wait) rather than erroring when configured via environment variables

Verdict

Worth a look if you run multiple coding agents and want them behind one self-hosted API with actual session isolation. Skip it if you are looking for a managed service with bundled models; this is strictly bring-your-own-key and bring-your-own-infrastructure.