CLI Agent Orchestrator (CAO) is an open-source agent orchestration harness maintained by AWS Labs (awslabs). It provides a structured CLI runtime environment to coordinate, run, and manage AI-powered CLI agents and external tool integrations within developer environments. In practical use, CAO enables developers to execute complex workflows by orchestrating command-line agent tasks, integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and interfacing with local dev setups. It includes native MCP application packages (`cao_mcp_apps`) to bridge agent reasoning with local system tools and developer workspace resources. What sets CLI Agent Orchestrator apart from standalone interactive coding agents is its focus on orchestration and containerized reproducibility. Through devcontainer feature support (`.devcontainer/features/cao`), CAO can be bundled directly into development container definitions, ensuring standardized agent execution across teams without manual environment setup. CLI Agent Orchestrator is fully open-source under the Apache 2.0 license and is maintained on GitHub by AWS Labs.
Tags: agent harness, cli, coding agent, OpenSource, terminal