I stumbled across [OpenHarness](https://openharness.dev) on a [Show HN post](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982105) yesterday and honestly had to read the pitch twice. The concept is wild: you submit an open source project idea, the community votes on it, and if it hits 100 upvotes, AI coding agents — we’re talking Codex, Claude, Cursor — just… build it. For free. No catch, no subscription tier, no “freemium” nonsense.
Here’s how it works. You post your idea on OpenHarness with enough detail for an AI agent to actually run with it. Other users upvote the ones they think are worth building. Once your idea crosses the 100-upvote threshold, the platform taps into partnerships with AI labs to secure free tokens, and the agents get to work writing, shipping, and maintaining the code. The philosophy behind it is pretty compelling — humans are good at spotting real-world problems, AI is getting scary good at writing code, so why not let each side do what it does best?
The creator (who goes by “naix” on HN) put it well: “AI agents have become really good at writing code. But actual ideas come from the real world. Real problems. Real needs.” That framing resonates with me. We’ve all had those shower-thought open source ideas that never go anywhere because who has the time? OpenHarness basically removes the execution barrier entirely.
Now, this is still very early. The project just launched on February 12, 2026, and the community is small. The big question is whether the AI lab partnerships can scale, and whether the 100-upvote mechanism creates the right filter for quality ideas versus just popular ones. There’s also the obvious concern about long-term maintenance — can AI agents handle bug reports and evolving requirements months down the line, or does it become abandonware with a shinier origin story?
Still, I think this is one of the more interesting experiments I’ve seen in the open source space lately. If the model works, it could genuinely lower the barrier for people who have great ideas but lack the engineering bandwidth to execute. Worth keeping an eye on.
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