October Harness

A complete coding agent. Multiplayer powered by October Bus.

October Harness uses October Bus as its native coordination layer. Connected agents discover peers, exchange durable messages, delegate work, and coordinate shared tasks while each keeps its own session, tools, and permissions. Run it solo in your terminal, or connect it to a team through the same open runtime. Use the interactive terminal, print mode, structured JSON, RPC, or the SDK.

Quickstart

Requires Node.js 22.19 or newer. Install the package, open a project, and run october.

npm install -g --ignore-scripts @october-dev/october
cd /path/to/your/project
october

Choose your model

Launch october directly from your project directory. No separate login command is needed before starting the harness. Desktop supplies and refreshes its signed-in session automatically.

Start with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8, October’s recommended model for text and reasoning. The catalog refreshes from the inference gateway. Explore your available models with /model or october --list-models.

Use /login for supported subscriptions such as ChatGPT Plus/Pro (Codex), Claude Pro/Max, and GitHub Copilot. Bring API keys for supported cloud providers, or configure a custom model catalog for local services such as Ollama, LM Studio, and vLLM.

Powered by October Bus

Turn individual agents into a team on shared infrastructure. October Bus makes peer identity, durable delivery, delegation, task ownership, and request/reply correlation explicit parts of the protocol. The harness executes; the Bus coordinates. The Bus launcher supplies execution-scoped credentials, and the harness discovers its MCP tools automatically.

Inside October Desktop

Launch harnesses on a shared canvas. Desktop handles authentication and the installed harness version, adds peer and task context, and follows session and turn activity. The same open agent runtime becomes part of a visual workspace for the whole operation.

Sessions and permissions

Resume, branch, fork, compact, inspect, and export append-only JSONL sessions stored under ~/.october/agent/sessions/. Shape the workflow with --permission-mode: ask before edits and commands, accept file edits while reviewing commands, or bypass tool-approval prompts for trusted work. Project trust settings let you choose which project-local resources to load.

Update the standalone harness

npm install -g --ignore-scripts @october-dev/october@latest
october --version

Restart running sessions after updating. Saved credentials, settings, and sessions are preserved. Desktop updates are managed separately.

Open source, extensions, and Pi

Built on Pi, with its attribution and MIT license preserved. October adds its own CLI, inference, authentication, permissions, Bus integration, and Desktop context. The complete agent runtime is yours to inspect, run, and extend with TypeScript tools, providers, hooks, skills, prompts, themes, and packages. Build on the same extension surface used by October.

Read the documentation, contribution guide, and current roadmap in the October Harness repository.