COMPARISON
RunLedger vs Homegrown Harness
Homegrown harnesses offer flexibility but require ongoing maintenance. RunLedger ships a proven baseline.
Direct Answer
Recommendation
Use RunLedger to avoid building and maintaining a custom harness unless you need deep bespoke behavior.
Custom harnesses can be tailored, but RunLedger already provides record/replay, contracts, budgets, and CI artifacts out of the box.
Quick Decision
| Use RunLedger when | Use a homegrown harness when |
|---|---|
| You want faster adoption and known patterns | You need bespoke internal integrations |
| You want standard artifacts and baselines | You want full control over every subsystem |
When a homegrown harness is better
- You need custom CI integrations not supported today.
- Your tooling requires deep internal hooks.
- You are willing to maintain long-term infrastructure.
When RunLedger wins
- You want battle-tested defaults and fast setup.
- You need record/replay and regression gates quickly.
- You want standard artifacts like JUnit + HTML reports.
Tradeoffs
- Less flexibility than a bespoke system.
- Requires aligning with RunLedger?s agent protocol.
bash
runledger run ./evals/demo --mode record
runledger run ./evals/demo --mode replay --baseline baselines/demo.jsonWhen NOT to use RunLedger
If you need unique internal integrations and can afford to maintain them, a custom harness may fit better.