update-harness

update-harness is a skill for Claude Code from bzantium/meta-harness. It costs 112 tokens per session (2,121 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A checker and updater for an existing Claude Code setup, including its agents, skills, hooks, rules, tools, and plugins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect a Claude Code harness and produce recommendations about what to remove, update, or add, then apply approved changes.
Why use it?
It helps find outdated parts, duplicated features, missing patterns, and possible improvements in a setup that has grown over time.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

Part of the meta-harness plugin — 2 skills, 2 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to inspect a Claude Code harness and produce recommendations about what to remove, update, or add, then apply approved changes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bzantium/meta-harness/update-harness
Install

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.

Any agent
npx skills add bzantium/meta-harness --skill update-harness
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bzantium/meta-harness

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install meta-harness, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills, 2 agents.

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.

agentmods badge for update-harness

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bzantium/meta-harness/update-harness/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bzantium/meta-harness/update-harness)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bzantium/meta-harness/update-harness"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bzantium/meta-harness/update-harness/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for update-harness

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bzantium/meta-harness/update-harness"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bzantium/meta-harness/update-harness.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 112 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,121 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00112 $0.02121
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.01060
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00424
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00212

Measured 9d ago against content hash 08d2142011d8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

update-harness 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 9d 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.

skills/update-harness/SKILL.md · 194 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 194 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

update-harness — Harness Health Check & Updater

Analyzes an existing Claude Code harness against current official features, project evolution, and the pattern library. Produces actionable recommendations: what to remove, update, and add.

Workflow

Phase 1: Inventory

Scan the existing harness and catalog every component:

  1. Agents — Read all .claude/agents/*.md: name, model, role, constraints
  2. Skills — Read all .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md: name, triggers, workflow
  3. Hooks — Read .claude/settings.json hooks section: events, matchers, scripts
  4. Rules — Read CLAUDE.md: delegation rules, conventions, agent catalog
  5. MCP — Read .mcp.json if present
  6. Plugins — Read .claude/settings.json enabled plugins

Produce an inventory list with component count. If no harness is found, inform the user and suggest using create-harness instead.

Phase 2: Official Features Delta

Check what the harness duplicates or could leverage from official features:

  1. Read ../create-harness/references/official-builtins.md
  2. WebSearch "Claude Code changelog latest features" for anything newer than the reference
  3. For each harness component, evaluate:
    • Redundant? — Does an official feature now do the same thing? (e.g., a custom explore agent when built-in Explore exists)
    • Superseded? — Has a new official feature made this component unnecessary? (e.g., custom task tracking when TaskCreate is now built-in)
    • Leverageable? — Could an official feature enhance this component? (e.g., a skill could use CronCreate instead of custom scheduling)

Phase 3: Project Evolution

Spawn scout to re-analyze the current project state:

Agent(
  name: "scout",
  prompt: "Analyze this project. Follow your investigation protocol and produce the structured analysis report.",
  model: "sonnet"
)

Compare the scout's current findings against what the harness covers:

Change Implication
New modules/services added Harness may need new agents or wider scope
Modules removed Harness may reference dead code
Tech stack changed (new framework, build tool) Hooks/skills may target wrong tools
Test framework changed Verification hooks may be broken
Team size changed (solo to team or vice versa) Harness scale may be wrong
New external integrations (APIs, databases) May need safety hooks or specialized agents

Read the full file on GitHub · 194 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.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 194 lines · 112 tokens per session scan A 08d2142011d8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

update-harness is a skill published in the GitHub repository bzantium/meta-harness (2 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 112 tokens to every session and 2,121 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-31.

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