Home / jakeselby / agent-harness · primitives/skills/harness-authoring/SKILL.md · GitHub

harness-authoring skillA

harness-authoring is agent-read markdown (skill) from jakeselby/agent-harness: Decide where an instruction belongs and write it there, then sync and lint. Use when asked to add, change or remove a rule, skill, instruction, hook, setting or CLAUDE.md line, to "remember" something that should persist beyond this session, or when a correction should apply to future sessions..

Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.

What the file says

# Harness authoring

Every instruction has exactly one right home. This skill finds it, writes there, and keeps the
harness checkout as the source of truth for everything generic.

## Find the checkout and the caller

```bash
python3 - <<'EOF'
import json, pathlib
m = json.load(open(pathlib.Path.home() / ".local/state/agent-harness/manifest.json"))
print(m["repo"])
EOF
git -C "$(…)" remote -v
```

If the manifest is missing, locate or install the harness before editing managed content.
Do not create a second authority in a runtime configuration directory. If `origin` is `<owner>/agent-harness` and you are that owner, you are the
**maintainer**. If `origin` is a fork and `upstream` is the harness, you are a **fork user**.

## The ladder — first match wins

1. **Must run at a lifecycle point regardless of the model's judgment** (a check before every
   commit, a validator after every write) → a shared policy under `policy/hooks/`, dispatched by
   `lib/harness_core/lifecycle.py`; native registrations belong in runtime adapters.
2. **Changes tool or editor configuration, not behaviour** → an owned native setting in the relevant
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

Latest version
mdr add jakeselby/agent-harness/harness-authoring@git:20260923.097bdb0
Exact content
mdr add jakeselby/agent-harness/harness-authoring@sha256:b9fbcf0860aa56be

Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.

Badge

mdr badge

[![mdr](https://markdownregistry.com/badge/art_r4vvcvoafatiqbvs.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_r4vvcvoafatiqbvs)

1 badge views in 30 days

Versions

versioncommittedcommitsizeaudit
git:20260923.097bdb0 latest2026-09-23 097bdb0 7,991 BA view · diff
git:20260922.3e259952026-09-22 3e25995 8,121 BA view · diff
git:20260919.04aa2b52026-09-19 04aa2b5 7,940 BA view · diff
git:20260919.6cf18f72026-09-19 6cf18f7 7,817 BA view

Audit of the latest version

A  17 of 17 checks passed. Deterministic, no model, same answer every run.
  • pass: Frontmatter block present
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a name
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a description
  • pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (7991 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

GitHub

jakeselby/agent-harness · 17 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-25 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_r4vvcvoafatiqbvs
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=jakeselby/agent-harness/harness-authoring
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/b9fbcf0860aa56be81e58b3fed9d30faf42e67825020f1a67f6b095f9ea03f4c

Your agent 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.

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