harden-agent-loop

Harden Agent Loop

Strengthen a coding-agent harness from outside the agent's own judgment. Prefer a deterministic control over another prompt paragraph, and change prompts only after diagnosing evidence.

Select One Mode

• Design Gates — use when introducing or reviewing hooks, guardrails, protected actions, completion checks, or tool contracts. Read quality-gates.md before designing controls.
• Improve From Failures — use when the same agent failure recurs and real traces are available. Read trace-to-eval.md before creating an eval or changing the harness.

Do not use this skill for an ordinary code defect, application performance work, or general measurable optimization. Use the relevant engineering workflow instead; once a trustworthy scalar evaluator exists and repeated autonomous optimization is desired, hand that loop to autoresearch.

Shared Rules

1. Inspect repository instructions, manifests, CI, test commands, and existing agent configuration before proposing controls. Read AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md when present; do not overwrite either without explicit authorization.
2. Preserve project-native conventions and checks. Add the smallest deterministic control that addresses the observed risk.
3. Keep one leading agent. Do not create a swarm. When independence materially improves verification, use at most one bounded verifier with fresh context and read-only access.
4. Treat production, databases, secrets, irreversible operations, and external side effects as approval boundaries. Require human approval immediately before the action.
5. Never run git reset --hard. Commit, push, or open a pull request only with explicit authorization and only for task-owned changes.
6. Fail closed: a blocked, timed-out, malformed, or unavailable safety check is not a pass.
7. Minimize logs and tool output. Redact secrets and personally identifiable information before storage, evaluation, or delegation.