Microsoft Agent Framework Harness and Foundry Hosted Agents reach GA — and a cited teardown puts Claude Code at 98.4% harness, 1.6% AI logic

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InfoQ reported on August 3 that the Agent Framework Harness and Foundry Hosted Agents moved to general availability in .NET and Python, four months after MAF 1.0 shipped on April 2. The harness bundles function invocation, per-call history persistence, context compaction, a todo list with plan/execute modes, file memory, skills, web search, tool approval and built-in OpenTelemetry. Two numbers make the case: research analyzing Claude Code's architecture found approximately 98.4% of the codebase is harness infrastructure versus 1.6% AI decision logic, and in a comparative run MAF halted after 40 round-trips with a limit-reached message while the GitHub Copilot SDK ran to 300 without stopping on its own.