Show HN: Horizons – OSS agent execution engine | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Horizons – OSS agent execution engine

github.com

39 pointsJoshPurtell8 comments

I'm Josh, founder of Synth. We've been working on coding agent optimization with method like GEPA and MIPRO (the latter of which, I helped to originally develop), agent evaluation via methods like RLMs, and large scale deployment for training and inference. We've also worked on patterns for memory, processing live context, and managing agent actions, combining it all in a single stack called Horizons. With the release of OpenAI's Frontier and the consumer excitement around OpenClaw, we think the timing is right to release a v0.

It integrates with our sdk for evaluation and optimization but also comes batteries-included with self-hosted implementations. We think Horizons will make building agent-based products a lot easier and help builders focus on their proprietary data, context, and algorithms

Some notes:

- you can configure claude code, codex, opencode to run in the engine. on-demand or on a cron

- we're striving to make it simple to integrate with existing backends via a 2-way event driven interface, but I'm 99.9% sure it'll change as there are a ton of unknown unknowns

- support for mcp, and we are building with authentication (rbac) in mind, although it's a long-journey

- all self-host able via docker

A very simplistic way to think about it - an OSS take on Frontier, or maybe OpenClaw for prod

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Fascinating platform. The API surface is much richer than I would have expected. Ooc, at what size do you think teams typically have use for this? I imagine you have to be running quite a few agents at scale before there's a strong usecase.

Just like codex or opencode provide strong oss implementations of the core agent loop, our ambition (not achieved! hoping this is a solid start) is to provide a solid oss implementation of the context updating loop, memory, basic database + a backend sync layer. And evals + continual learning + gepa optimization.

Just like everyone can write their own agent, yet many opt for codex/claude code sdk/opencode, we think that at some point in our journey, many will also opt for standard implementations of these patterns, for projects big or small.

Realistically, though, the case for a standardized environment grows a lot stronger when you have multi-agent, permissioned actions, and generally just a lot more state than what you can get away with using only opencode + some glue. Insofar as big teams have ambitious products, they might be more likely to try it

Really cool project, it looks really useful. We’re moving past manual prompt optimization and considering different options for tuning long horizon tasks. We will likely go with Horizons

Really cool!

Not really OSS though

Why, because of the Sentry license?

Yeah, that’s not open source. You plan on releasing today’s version as open source two years from now, but it is not currently open source and won’t be for years. Even when it does become open source it will be a version that is two years out of date, not the current version.

Open source allows commercial competition. You apparently didn’t want that, so you chose a non-open source license that specifically forbids that. That’s your prerogative, but you shouldn’t tell people it is open source.

I concede that it is not precisely OSS. But if I tell someone that it is source-available, they will expect some kind of license restriction for any use. If I tell someone OSS, they will expect mostly what the Sentry license entails, unless they are a competitor, in which case I really don't care what they think.

I wish there were a popular term that conveys exactly how Sentry license works. But, there isn't - so I think it's fair to say open source, maybe as a general term. I'll change it from OSS to open source

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