Harden - A security layer for AI coding agents

👋 Hi y'all, Pushpak here, co-founder and CEO of Harden.

I run coding agents all day. The best days are the ones where I hand off something real, walk away, and come back to finished work. The worst days are the ones where I can't walk away, so I sit there approving every command like a nervous parent.

Everyone who uses agents has a story. A rm -rf in the wrong directory. A .env pasted into a chat. A migration that hit prod instead of staging. A curl that shipped a customer table to a domain nobody recognized.

So we babysit. And babysitting caps how much work you can hand off.

That's why we built Harden Agentic Integrity Foundation (AIF).

AIF checks every agent action before it runs. Inside the task you gave? The agent keeps moving. Leaking a secret, sending data somewhere it shouldn't, dropping a table? AIF pauses, rewrites, or blocks that one action, and the agent keeps going with everything else.

• Checks commands, file edits, tool calls, and outbound requests

• Catches secret leaks, data exfiltration, and destructive infra ops before they happen

• Keeps long-running agents on the task you gave them

• Runs locally. Your repo, context, and tool output stay on your machine

• Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Hermes, OpenClaw, Kiro, and Antigravity

• Free for individual developers

Our post-trained 8 billion parameter model beats frontier models on all agent-security benchmarks, and it's small enough to run next to your agent without slowing it down.

Getting started takes about a minute:

1. Go to harden.run or the GitHub repo.

2. Paste the install command into your terminal.

3. Run your coding agent like you normally do.

Then try the thing you've been afraid to hand off.

We'd love your feedback, especially the rough edges. If anything breaks during setup, book a call and we'll get you running.

Big thanks to the Harden team and our early testers. We'll be here all day answering questions and learning from what you throw at it.

The big fear with coding agent right now is if you want to hand off a bigger task and walk away there is always a worry about what the agent might do next... how AIF handles actions that aren't obviously dangerous but still outside the intent of the original task?

This feels increasingly crucial as we give coding agents more autonomy aka FAFO. Excited to try @Harden with @Claude Code .

Over the last few days, Harden AIF has already blocked 49 risky tool calls 🔥

Feels awesome to finally see something we built out in the wild and doing what it’s supposed to do

Now it’s yours to try, and it’s completely free for individual developers, so give it a shot, push it, break it, and let us know what you think

Huge congratulations to the team 🚀

AIF is built for the moment you stop watching.

I learned why that matters while an agent was debugging a Stripe issue for me. It spent hours reading logs, editing code, running tests, and preparing diagnostic data. An earlier edit accidentally left customer email addresses in the final file, which the agent later tried to upload to Datadog.

AIF reasoned through the action, connected the upload to the earlier edits and files that produced it, stopped the transfer, and told the agent what needed to be fixed.

Let the agents cook. Keep secrets off the menu.

Coding agents are getting very capable, but giving them full access feels like a bad idea. Definitely curious to try.

Agent Security is the most important requirement for anyone right now, seeing what happened to Hugging Face Attack. we should take this problem seriously, Product Like Harden are vert important.

Do you have MCP Connectors. So AIF can check those as well?

can finally run my coding agent in YOLO mode and walk away. AIF checks what it is doing and stops things that could go wrong, so I don't have to babysit it.

How does Harden handle a tool call when it’s unsure whether the action is safe?

This is such an interesting problem to solve. We’re giving agents more autonomy every month, so the security layer has to catch up too