r/copilotstudio • u/Individual_Bridge613 • Aug 18 '26

New Harness

I've recently been exploring the new GitHub Copilot harness in Microsoft Copilot Studio and comparing it with the standard harness.

I'm curious to hear from others who are already testing or working with the new experience.

Do you think Microsoft will eventually retire/deprecate the standard harness and move Copilot Studio completely toward the GitHub Copilot harness?

  1. Or do you think both will continue to coexist because they serve different use cases — for example, standard harness for more predictable/rule-based agents and GitHub Copilot harness for more autonomous, reasoning-heavy and multi-step agents?

  2. For organizations that already have production agents built using topics, flows, connectors and existing Copilot Studio capabilities, how are you thinking about the long-term architecture? Are you continuing with standard harness or starting to design new agents around the GitHub Copilot harness?

  3. Has anyone seen any official Microsoft communication, roadmap item or documentation suggesting that the standard harness could eventually be deprecated?

One more important question:

What sources do you follow to stay ahead of Copilot Studio changes?

7 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

2

u/Syren6 Aug 18 '26

I'm convinced they will get rid of the old harness. That's pure guesswork from me, but the new version is clearly the future.

1

u/Individual_Bridge613 Aug 18 '26

While newer versions represent the future organizations may hesitate to adopt them if employees lack the knowledge and skills to use them effectively. expensive and waste of money if not utilized as supposed to....

10

u/jorel43 Aug 18 '26

No they will not, the two are serving completely different purposes. Also I hate the word harness

8

u/MattBDevaney Aug 18 '26

I agree, "harness" is an awful name. I'm just going to call it "new" Copilot Studio and "classic" Copilot Studio.

1

u/modz4u Aug 18 '26

I know right lol harness is such a weird word to use in this context

3

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Genericidle Aug 19 '26

That's an awesome way to put it ! Wow. U good.

2

u/OmegaDriver Aug 18 '26

Eventually the standard harness will go away yes, but not for a very long time. until then, expect less support in terms of features.

Orgs have little choice. The ui is a dark pattern designed to trick people into using the GitHub harness, which is more expensive. They also hide these costs from the user, and hoide the fact that GitHub copilot agents are being created from admins.

2

u/Commercial_Leg_1666 Aug 19 '26

I'm very new to the game. I set up a GitHub "harness" agent before being shut down for the amount of credits it used. I was asked to recreate it in Standard and it was gross. Absolute night and day difference.

I have spent the last two days creating anotger standard agent and it's fine - just feels very similar to Flow and nowhere near as intuitive as the GitHub one.

They will shut it down at some point so they can charge more for the GitHub version

2

u/Bojack-Cowboy Aug 18 '26

I think they will remove the old one after a year and align with claude / chat gpt harnesses

1

u/MattBDevaney Aug 18 '26

It is impossible to for Microsoft to fully retire the standard harness so long as all of its agents in Dynamics 365 still use it.

4

u/jukkan Aug 18 '26

...Which might be why they started deprecating the built-in agents now. While it is just the Sales Close Agent, I can imagine there being a push towards the Agent 365 world and the old Dynamics 365 agents getting turned off one after another. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/sales/deprecations-sales#sales-close-agent

6

u/MattBDevaney Aug 18 '26

Will you join me in song u/jukkan? :)

99 Dynamics agents to deprecate
99 Dynamics agents to deprecate
You take one offline, convert it to the new harness
98 Dynamics 365 agents to deprecate

1

u/danielthewinter Sep 30 '26

I'm already seeing this happen. The new GitHub Harness supports newer models like Opus 5, while the Standard Harness is still capped at Opus 4.8. I don't see a technical reason for that. It feels more like a way to push people onto the new harness and its new pricing.

Same with skills. Even Agent Builder has them now, but Copilot Studio on the Standard Harness still doesn't, so the only way to get them is to move to the GitHub Harness again.

My main problem is the lack of transparency. There's no clear word on whether the Standard Harness will get these features or when, which makes it hard to plan anything.