Raven

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Raven is EverMind-AI’s Apache-2.0 “harness of harnesses”: a self-hosted host agent that plans work as a DAG and orchestrates its own Research, Code, Design, and Oncall agents alongside Claude Code and Codex.

Raven pairs one of the more interesting architectures in this category with its most instructive launch failure: the authors posted AI-generated comments to their own Hacker News thread, and the pitch’s “recursive self-improvement” is, as one commenter put it, loops.

What it is
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A self-hosted platform where a Host Agent decomposes a task into a DAG and dispatches the nodes to built-in agents (Raven-Research for deep research, Raven-Code for software development, Raven-Design for visual design, Raven-Oncall for unattended automation) or to external harnesses such as Claude Code and Codex. It ships sandboxing, sub-agents, channels, Docker deployment, and trajectory replay, plus Evolver, a separate tool that consumes Raven as a library and evaluates candidate harness changes. The README claims its agents beat Claude Code on both quality and cost in its own ArtifactsBench benchmarks, which are self-published. Apache-2.0, self-hosted, by EverMind-AI, with a technical report released as its own GitHub release on 2026-09-27.

Status
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Active and very early: 5,213 stars and 149 forks as of 2026-10-05, created 2026-05-21, with 35 contributors and v0.2.4 out on 2026-10-03 after five releases in September. The Show HN thread from 2026-09-29 drew 55 points and about 51 comments, and it is where the launch went wrong: dang, Hacker News’s moderator, asked the authors to stop posting AI-generated or AI-edited comments, which site rules prohibit. The same thread produced the sharpest one-line critique of the positioning: “it is loops”, with no weight updates anywhere in the system.

Strengths
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The DAG-planning host over heterogeneous agents (its own four plus Claude Code and Codex) is a design most columns approximate with a lead agent and optimism.
Trajectory replay provides run-level audit, the feature Atlas built an entire product around, included here.
Evolver, which treats the harness itself as the thing under test, is the most original idea in this batch of entrants.
Shipping velocity: five releases in September 2026 plus a technical report.

Cautions
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The launch carried a moderation warning about AI-generated comments, which is exactly the trust failure an agent company cannot afford.
The recursive-self-improvement framing oversells: the self-evolution mechanism the README describes is generate-and-test over candidate changes, which is loops, and I found no training-loop evidence anywhere in the sources.
The benchmark claims (beating Claude Code on quality and cost on ArtifactsBench) come from the project’s own dashboards and should be treated as marketing until someone reproduces them.
0.2.x versioning with 92 open issues as of 2026-10-05: expect API churn.

Pricing
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Free and open source under Apache-2.0, self-hosted on your own hardware or Docker host. No hosted tier recorded and no Raven bill.

Compared to
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Agent Swarm: the other self-hosted platform that turns orchestration into Docker-isolated workers and pull requests; choose Agent Swarm for intake-to-PR pipelines, Raven for DAG-planned heterogeneous teams with its own agents.
oh-my-codex: the single-CLI enhancement path; choose it for Codex-only depth, Raven for multi-agent breadth.
The Perfect Orchestrator: lead-and-worker tmux with adversarial verification; choose it for minimal infrastructure, Raven for sandboxing, replay, and a platform.

Bottom line
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Recommended for self-hosting teams who want DAG-planned heterogeneous agents and will independently verify both the benchmarks and the comments. Not for anyone who needs a clean provenance story today or stable APIs before 1.0.

Changes
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2026-10-06 - Created.

References
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https://api.github.com/repos/EverMind-AI/Raven - stars, forks, Apache-2.0 license, creation date, and push date as of 2026-10-05
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EverMind-AI/Raven/main/README.md - the DAG host agent, built-in agents, Evolver, and the benchmark claims
https://evermind-ai.github.io/Raven/ - the documentation site
https://api.github.com/repos/EverMind-AI/Raven/releases - v0.2.4 (2026-10-03), the September cadence, and tech-report-v1 (2026-09-27)
https://raven.evermind.ai - the “harness of harnesses, built for RSI” positioning
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49890647 - the Show HN thread, dang’s AI-comments warning, and the loops critique

dag-planning on tomrochette.com

Raven

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dag-planning on tomrochette.com

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