harness-engineering SKILL.md skillA
harness-engineering from docxology/template is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add docxology/template/harness-engineering@git:20260713.397aa15Pins git:20260713.397aa15 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- docxology/template
- Path
.agents/skills/harness-engineering/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- git:20260713.397aa15, committed Jul 13, 2026
- Size
- 11,413 bytes
- Repository stars
- 20
- License
- Apache-2.0
This skill should be used when designing autonomous agent harnesses: research loops, evaluation scaffolds, locked and editable surfaces, durable logs, novelty gates, pruning, rollback, PR preparation, and human approval boundaries.
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Harness Engineering Harness engineering designs the control system around an agent: what it may edit, how it receives feedback, where it writes state, how failures recover, and who can approve irreversible actions. The harness is the difference between a helpful agent session and an autonomous loop that can run for days without corrupting its objective. ## When to Activate Activate this skill when: - Building autonomous research or experimentation loops - Designing an agent environment with locked metrics and editable code or content - Creating PR-producing or background agents - Evaluating whether an agent can safely run without frequent human prompts - Adding novelty, ablation, pruning, rollback, or durable logging to an agent workflow - Preventing agents from gaming benchmarks, weakening rubrics, or losing state across compaction Do not activate this skill for adjacent work owned by other skills: - General quality gates, regression suites, or outcome metrics without autonomous control surfaces: `evaluation`. - Tool schemas, response formats, and recovery errors for harness tools: `tool-design`. …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add docxology/template/harness-engineering@sha256:dde3d8f46d4d09dbThe line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260713.397aa15, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_amiglsvtoy3qiwq3)
2 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Jul 13, 2026.
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (11413 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
docxology/template · 20 stars · license Apache-2.0 · pushed 2026-10-31 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_amiglsvtoy3qiwq3 GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=docxology/template/harness-engineering GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/dde3d8f46d4d09dbab41358baa3e8310d7fdfcd2fbefa127153ac4f6b5ef7b16
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.
More from docxology/template
Every file in docxology/template