Show HN: VAEN – Package and import portable AI coding-agent Harnesses

[sjhalani7]

Hi HN, I built VAEN (an open source CLI) because I kept running into a boring problem with AI coding-agent workflows: the setup becomes useful, but then it is hard to move.

A good, useful agentic harness consists of more than just instructions: skills, mcp servers and more. There should be a better way to share those than just .MD files, and that is why I created VAEN.

What works: create a yaml, run the CLI commands as per the repo, and get a .agent file that you can share and extract. Think of how awesome it could be if anyone could use a very useful agentic harness, and share it with one CLI command.

[smaknish]

This is very useful

[steviedean]

cool, is .agent binary encoded?

[sjhalani7]

The .agent file itself is a tar-based OCI style archive. Within the archive, there is utf-8 encoded JSON metadata and raw bundled files (which are the instructions, skills, etc)