WHAT

Developers need the ability to test a Harness CI pipeline locally before it runs on live Harness infrastructure.

WHY

Today the only way to validate a pipeline is to import it into Harness and run it live — consuming delegate capacity and creating a slow iteration loop when it fails. PayPal is migrating 12,000+ developers

and 7 business units from Jenkins/circle CI/Argo CD etc to Harness against a hard deadline of August 13, 2026. Every failed live run during migration adds iteration cost and slows BU onboarding. Jenkins always supported local builds before pushing a Jenkins file. The absence of an equivalent in Harness is the single biggest developer experience friction point in our migration.