As the cost of scaling AI agents gets higher up the CIO priority list, AWS has added an efficiency-focused agent harness to its open source Strands SDK for building agents.
The Strands harness launched on Monday, described by AWS engineers as able to run general-purpose agents at a 28% lower cost when using Claude or GPT models with “nearly equal” benchmark scores.
Principal Engineer Arron Bailiss wrote in a blog post: “Our default context management largely drove the token-efficiency and accuracy: tool results over ~1500 tokens get truncated, [and] summarization (compaction) triggers when the context window hits above 85%.”
The harness SDK is available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license as part of the Strands monorepo for building and running agents in Python and TypeScript.
