symphony
Symphony is an open-source orchestration framework from OpenAI designed to turn project work into isolated, autonomous implementation runs. It integrates with project management tools like Linear to monitor tasks and spawn AI coding agents that autonomously handle them. Each run is self-contained, producing verifiable proof of work including CI build status, automated PR reviews, complexity analysis, and video walkthroughs. The system is built to allow teams to manage high-level work rather than supervising individual coding agents, enabling a shift from micromanagement to strategic oversight. The reference implementation is written in Elixir and is intended for experimental use in trusted environments. Symphony builds on the concept of harness engineering, where coding agents are guided by existing tooling and processes, and extends it to fully autonomous task completion. It aims to streamline software development workflows by offloading routine implementation tasks to AI, while maintaining quality through rigorous verification.
- Category
- AI Agents
- Pricing
- Open Source
Problem solved
Software development teams often spend significant time reviewing, guiding, and correcting AI-generated code. Symphony solves this by automating the entire implementation lifecycle for defined project tasks. Instead of manually supervising each code change, engineers can define work items and let Symphony's agents autonomously implement, verify, and merge them with comprehensive proof of correctness. This reduces the cognitive load on developers and allows them to focus on higher-level design and project management.
Use cases
- Automatically fixing reported bugs from a Linear board and merging the fix with CI checks.
- Implementing new features based on user stories, producing pull requests with automated tests and review evidence.
- Performing codebase-wide refactoring tasks, such as updating deprecated APIs or patterns.
- Running scheduled maintenance tasks like dependency updates and security patches.
- Generating or updating documentation in response to code changes.
Audience
- Developers
- Enterprise
- Startups
Pros
- Reduces developer oversight of AI agents
- Provides verifiable proof of work for each task
- Integrates with existing project management tools like Linear
- Open-source and customizable for various codebases
- Enables autonomous, end-to-end task completion
Cons
- Experimental and not intended for production use yet
- Requires adoption of harness engineering practices, which may be a barrier
- Reference implementation is limited to Elixir, requiring language-specific adaptation for other projects
Official website: https://github.com/openai/symphony
Canonical LambdaBase page: https://www.lambdabase.com/tools/symphony