Find a HARNESS.md for your project
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3 entries
- exploratory-prototype
A deliberately thin agent harness for an exploratory prototype, proof of concept, demo, spike, or research experiment: one person, a coding agent supervised turn by turn, code that is thrown away or redesigned within a quarter, and nothing a wrong change can damage. Keeps only what still matters when everything else is disposable: isolation from host credentials, a secret scan, one command that runs the thing, a smoke check, and checkpoint commits. States the triggers for moving to a heavier design.
- production-engineering
A full agent harness for a production codebase maintained by a team for years, where a wrong change can reach users, data, or money, and coding agents work task by task with review in between or partly unattended. Hosted on GitHub or GitLab. Covers all seven layers: an isolated environment with scoped credentials and a tool inventory, a short entrypoint with routed knowledge files, fast and full verification an agent can run itself, pre-commit and CI gates behind one summary check, a written permission policy with a protected default branch and squash merges, specification-driven completion with recorded approval, and drift control with a harness self-check.
- solo-open-source-library
A medium-weight agent harness for a public open-source library with one maintainer who accepts outside contributions: a long-lived package whose public API other projects depend on, hosted on GitHub or GitLab, where issues and pull requests bring in text and code anyone can write. Lets a contributor's coding agent succeed without the maintainer, protects against prompt injection from public content, gates the public API with a snapshot, semantic versioning, and a changelog, asks for a short proposal only when the API changes, and keeps ceremony low everywhere else.
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What a HARNESS.md is
A HARNESS.md records the design of a project's agent harness: where a coding agent runs, what it reads, how it checks its own work, what stops a bad change, and what it may do without asking. The entrypoint file, the permission files, the hooks, and the CI configuration are built from it.
You can use one in two ways. As a template: save a file from the hub in your project root, tell your coding agent what the project is for, and have it check the file's Context section against your project before it builds the harness. Delete the file afterwards if you like. Or as an anchor document: keep it in the repository as the project's lasting record of the design, change it rarely, and open it only to check the harness for drift or to improve it.
The specification is there to help you write a HARNESS.md; reading one does not depend on it. An agent that has never seen the specification, with no plugin installed, can still read the file and act on it.
Where to go next
- Read the specificationThe whole format, on one page.
- Browse the hubEntries you can save into a project as its HARNESS.md.
- Install the pluginSkills that design, build, extract, and audit a harness in Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity.
What is in the file
A short frontmatter with the file's name and description, then a title, an introduction, and prose under whatever headings suit the design. The specification recommends these thirteen headings, in this order. None is required.
- Contextthe facts that shape the design: cost of a mistake, team, platform
- Invariantsrules every task follows
- Stylewhat the code should look like so agents can work in it
- File Structurethe directories and files the design requires
- Environmentwhere the agent runs and what it can reach
- Knowledgewhat the agent reads, and when
- Feedbackhow the agent verifies its own work
- Gatesthe checks that stop defects
- Authoritywhat the agent may do on its own, and what needs a human
- Completionhow a goal is agreed, and what counts as done
- Entropyhow the harness stays true to the code
- Open Questionswhat is still undecided
- Referencesthe material the design drew on