# Y Combinator plans to open-source QM, its company-wide agent harness > Source: > Published: 2026-07-31 18:08:30+00:00 [Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/press) said Friday that it plans to open-source QM, a multi-agent harness that YC uses across accounting, legal, events and engineering. The July 31st announcement moves a piece of YC's internal operating system into public view as startups test how far agents can travel beyond coding and individual productivity. YC described QM [in a two-post thread on X](https://x.com/ycombinator/status/2083243960684908768?s=46) as an early, customizable system built for an entire organization. Its listed components include scheduled and webhook-based triggers, persistent memory, shared files, browser access, connections to company data, shareable web applications and projects where multiple people can work with agents. The release fits the builder-led history of YC under [Garry Tan (@garrytan)](https://x.com/garrytan), its president and CEO. Tan was a YC founder with Posterous before returning as a partner, and he [built Bookface and YC's Demo Day website](https://www.ycombinator.com/people/garry-tan) during his first stint inside the organization. He later co-founded Initialized Capital and returned to lead YC in 2023. Tan has also publicly described running both Hermes Agent and OpenClaw, the two open-source systems YC cited as reference points for QM. In an April post, he [said he used one instance of each](https://x.com/garrytan/status/2042451113954459950), calling his Hermes agent "Neuromancer" and his OpenClaw installation "Wintermute." YC's choice of comparisons draws on tools already circulating inside its leadership, though YC presented QM as shared workplace infrastructure instead of a single user's assistant. ### One harness across the organization A screenshot released with the announcement shows QM running in a web interface with sections for projects, chats, files, webhooks, scheduled jobs, credentials, deployments, memory and skills. YC describes the product as "a multiplayer agent harness for work" available through Slack and the web. That multiplayer design is QM's central distinction. Shared projects, files and artifacts give several employees a common surface for assigning work and reviewing agent output. Connectors to what YC calls a "company brain" are intended to provide organizational context across those sessions. Scheduled triggers and webhooks allow agents to begin work from an event or timetable without waiting for a new prompt. [Hermes Agent](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent), developed by Nous Research, already combines persistent memory, scheduled tasks, project context, skills and connections to external tools. Its public repository describes a system that learns from a user's prior conversations and can operate through messaging services or cloud infrastructure. [OpenClaw](https://openclaw.ai/) has similarly grown around customizable personal agents with persistent context, extensions and proactive background tasks. QM packages comparable primitives around a shared organization. The shift changes the engineering burden. Agents working inside accounting and legal systems need narrower permissions, traceable actions and controls over which employees and agents can access sensitive records. Browser support and stored credentials increase the number of systems an agent can touch, making identity, approval and audit design central to whether the harness can move from an internal experiment to dependable workplace software. YC has already funded companies pursuing parts of the same problem. [Opensteer](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/opensteer), a Summer 2023 YC company, builds job-specific agent harnesses with browser access, memory, schedules, rules and approval gates. Opensteer separates workflows into specialized agents, while QM is presented as a common environment spanning departments and multiplayer projects. ### YC is dogfooding the agent stack YC says its engineering staff uses QM to work on QM itself. That claim makes the release a test of recursive agent development: the harness is one of the tools used to build and modify the harness. YC also says employees use it for events, accounting and legal work, giving QM a broader internal test bed than a coding-only agent. The scope matters because YC has funded more than 5,000 companies since 2005. Releasing an internal pattern can spread it across founders already looking to replace isolated chat interfaces with persistent agents that share context, run on schedules and produce artifacts other employees can reuse. YC cautioned that QM remains experimental, early and buggy. A public codebase would expose how YC handles the difficult parts behind its feature list, including agent coordination, memory boundaries, credentials and access to shared company data. QM's first test is whether an internal system shaped around YC's own workflows can be customized for organizations with different controls, software stacks and tolerance for autonomous action.