Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add autonomous-ai/autonomous-os --skill harness-usegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/autonomous-ai/autonomous-osWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/autonomous-ai/autonomous-os/harness-use)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/autonomous-ai/autonomous-os/harness-use"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/autonomous-ai/autonomous-os/harness-use/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/autonomous-ai/autonomous-os/harness-use"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/autonomous-ai/autonomous-os/harness-use.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00084 | $0.01385 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00042 | $0.00692 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00277 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00138 |
Grade A, and why
harness-use 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 yesterday.
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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 52 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Harness use
Run python3 scripts/harness.py ACTION - from this skill directory on the device, with one JSON object on stdin. The helper calls the OS API on localhost; agent work runs on the paired computer, never on the device.
Do not run harness.py --help, read this file again, or inspect the skill directory during a user task; the commands and JSON shapes below are the complete contract. A send or answer that returns a receipt in queued, delivered, started, completed, or rejected has a known outcome. With a response target, it is the last Harness command of this turn: immediately reply exactly NO_REPLY. Do not call receipt, status, recap, list, or a second send/answer after it. The OS receives lifecycle events and delivers the result to the original turn. Only inspect a receipt when the mutation result is explicitly unknown (DeliveryUnknown / no usable receipt), or when the user asks for its delivery state; never resend automatically after inspecting it.
When the current input includes [harness-reply run_id=... channel=voice|web], copy those values unchanged into the response object of a send or answer call. After a successful mutation, reply exactly NO_REPLY; do not poll receipt/recap or rewrite the result. The OS delivers Harness's terminal recap directly to that run. channel=web displays it in Web Chat and suppresses TTS; channel=voice speaks the same recap.
Routing
Use Harness when the user asks a named, selected, current, coding, or research
agent on the Mac to perform work. This includes requests such as “ask Claude
Code to search for sushi restaurants” even when the requested agent may use a
browser while it works. Do not fall back to computer-use or
agent-management because an Autonomous Buddy pairing is absent.
computer-use is only for directly operating a visible Mac app or browser.
agent-management / Autonomous Buddy is only for an explicit request to use
Buddy or a legacy Buddy session.
What ships with it
3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- yesterday First seen · 52 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A 780ef584d074
harness-use is a skill published in the GitHub repository autonomous-ai/autonomous-os (317 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 1,385 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 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 2026-09-09.
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