What is claude-harness CLAUDE.md?

Project instructions for the Claude Harness plugin, a system for organizing coding sessions with saved context, automated checks, feature tracking, and agent teams. ATDD means acceptance test-driven development: defining expected behavior as tests before implementation.

It helps maintain the harness project, preserve context between sessions, manage features and GitHub work, run quality checks, and coordinate implementation through agent teams.

It gives the coding agent a consistent startup routine and explains where project memory, hooks, skills, agents, and configuration live.

How panayiotism/claude-harness configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to panayiotism/claude-harness. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/panayiotism/claude-harness/main/CLAUDE.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/panayiotism/claude-harness

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/panayiotism/claude-harness/claude-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/panayiotism/claude-harness/claude-md)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/panayiotism/claude-harness/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/panayiotism/claude-harness/claude-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/panayiotism/claude-harness/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/panayiotism/claude-harness/claude-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 701 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 701 The same file — it is already loaded in full.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00701	$0.00701
Opus 5.5	$0.00280	$0.00280
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00140	$0.00140
Haiku 4.5	$0.00070	$0.00070

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 4ea63238115a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

claude-harness CLAUDE.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

CLAUDE.md · 53 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 53 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Claude Harness Plugin

Project Overview

Claude Code plugin for automated, context-preserving coding sessions with 5-layer memory architecture, failure prevention, self-improving skills, feature tracking, GitHub integration, Agent Teams with ATDD (Acceptance Test-Driven Development), and quality gate hooks.

Tech Stack

Shell/Bash (setup.sh, hooks/)
Markdown (skills)
JSON (configuration, state files)

Session Startup Protocol

The SessionStart hook auto-injects session context (features, GitHub info, interrupt markers). Before starting harness work, read .claude-harness/session-briefing.md for full context; check .claude-harness/features/active.json for current priorities.

Project Structure

skills/ - Agent Skills (SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter, auto-discovered by Claude Code)
agents/ - Plugin subagents (harness-implementer executes delegated feature lifecycles)
hooks/ - Session hooks (8 registrations, extensionless scripts with run-hook.cmd polyglot wrapper)
scripts/ - Shared helpers (compile-briefing.py compiles memory into briefings)
schemas/ - Canonical JSON Schema files for state file validation
setup.sh - Project initialization script (memory dirs, CLAUDE.md, migrations; stamp-gated at session start)
.claude-plugin/plugin.json - Plugin manifest
Marketplace lives in separate repo: panayiotism/claude-harness-marketplace
Updates tracked by git commit SHA (no semver in plugin.json) — GitHub Actions syncs to marketplace on every push

GitHub Integration

All GitHub operations use the gh CLI (issues, PRs, merges). The GitHub MCP server is NOT required.

Development Rules

Work on ONE feature at a time
Always update .claude-harness/claude-progress.json after completing work
Update changelog in README.md
Commit with descriptive messages
Leave codebase in clean, working state

Available Skills (6 total)

/claude-harness:setup - Initialize harness in project
/claude-harness:start - Start session, compile context
/claude-harness:flow - Unified workflow (recommended)
- Flags: --no-merge --plan-only --autonomous --quick --fix --team
/claude-harness:checkpoint - Manual commit + push + PR
/claude-harness:merge - Merge all PRs, auto-version, release
/claude-harness:prd-breakdown - Analyze PRD and break down into features with Gherkin acceptance criteria

Read the full file on GitHub · 53 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 53 lines · 701 tokens per session scan A 4ea63238115a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

claude-harness CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository panayiotism/claude-harness (79 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 701 tokens to every session, about $0.0028 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Memory and context Project management

claude-harness CLAUDE.md next to 6 instructions from other repositories
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claude-harness CLAUDE.mdpanayiotism/claude-harness	Instructions file	79	3mo ago	MIT	A	701	Claude Code
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claude-harness: Instructions file for Claude Code