Microsoft Research Open-Sources Orchard — a Kubernetes Env Service That Trains Agents Inside Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw Harnesses
Microsoft Research published Orchard on August 3, an open-source framework built around Orchard Env, a lightweight Kubernetes environment service that supplies reusable isolated components for data collection, RL rollouts, and evaluation across software-engineering, web-navigation, and personal-assistant agents without per-domain modification. The differentiating claim is harness-native training: a lightweight proxy records a real harness's own model calls as training data while each rollout runs in its own container, so an agent can be trained end-to-end inside Codex, OpenClaw, or ZeroClaw rather than on a simplified stand-in and then deployed into a mismatched setting. Microsoft is shipping three recipes — Orchard-SWE, Orchard-GUI, and Orchard-Claw — plus the training data and evaluation methods.
↳ Follow the thread