What is ai-harness-setup?

A setup workflow that turns an ordinary code repository into a structured environment for working with coding agents. It first identifies the languages, package managers, tests, checks, continuous-integration system, and whether the repository is a monorepo, meaning one repository containing multiple related projects.

Inspecting a repository, setting up dependency and skill delivery, adding a change-management process, configuring checks and agent skills, documenting the workflow, and setting up supported development environments.

It prevents agent tooling from being configured around the wrong technology stack or project layout.

ai-harness-setup — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by cisco-open

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 cisco-open/ai-harness-toolkit --skill ai-harness-setup

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cisco-open/ai-harness-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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/skills/cisco-open/ai-harness-toolkit/ai-harness-setup/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cisco-open/ai-harness-toolkit/ai-harness-setup)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cisco-open/ai-harness-toolkit/ai-harness-setup"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cisco-open/ai-harness-toolkit/ai-harness-setup/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/skills/cisco-open/ai-harness-toolkit/ai-harness-setup"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cisco-open/ai-harness-toolkit/ai-harness-setup.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 123 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 4,945 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. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

medium MCP Rug Pull · line 184
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]

How audits are shown

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	$0.00123	$0.04945
Opus 5	$0.00062	$0.02472
Sonnet 5	$0.00025	$0.00989
Haiku 4.5	$0.00012	$0.00494

Measured 9d ago against content hash 382eca7949ad, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ai-harness-setup 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/ai-harness-setup/SKILL.md · 284 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 284 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AI Harness Setup

Use this skill to bootstrap a repository toward a durable agent-driven workflow: deep inspection first, then APM as the dependency and skill delivery layer, spec-driven development for change management (OpenSpec by default, or the repo's existing system), deterministic checks matched to the detected stack, AI skills for review and delivery, a docs tree that explains the whole system, and AI IDE configuration for every IDE the team uses.

Quick Start

Inspect first. Search the repo's manifests, lockfiles, CI configs, framework configs, and existing docs to classify the full stack before changing anything. Record: languages, package managers, type checkers, test runners, linters, CI system, monorepo layout, and existing tooling.
Read the matching stack guide based on detection results:
- references/stacks/javascript-typescript/stack.md
- references/stacks/python/stack.md
- references/stacks/java/stack.md
If the repo uses a major framework, also read the matching framework guide:
- references/stacks/javascript-typescript/framework-react.md
- references/stacks/javascript-typescript/framework-angular.md
- references/stacks/java/framework-spring-boot.md
Ask whether the team wants GitHub Agentic Workflows enabled in this repository.
Ask whether deterministic checks should be enforced or advisory before configuring any checks. Carry that answer through all downstream local scripts, CI wiring, and git hooks.
If GitHub Agentic Workflows are enabled, read references/github-agentic-workflows.md before installing AI workflow tooling.
Read references/ai-tooling.md before initializing APM or installing package-backed skills.
Read references/mcp-servers.md before adding extra MCP servers to apm.yml.
Read references/openspec.md for change management setup.
Read references/deterministic-checks-core.md and the matching per-stack deterministic-scans.md together -- they form one phase.
Read references/dependabot.md when adding Dependabot configuration.
Read references/docs-bootstrap.md when creating the docs section that explains the workflow.
Read references/opencode.md when OpenCode or ocx support is requested.
Verify is mandatory. After all setup steps finish, run the Verify step in Workflow Step 10 to audit the changeset against the harness instructions, fix every gap found, and produce a verify report. Never skip this step.

Read the full file on GitHub · 284 lines

Files

What ships with it

24 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.

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.

9d ago First seen · 284 lines · 123 tokens per session scan A 382eca7949ad

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ai-harness-setup is a skill published in the GitHub repository cisco-open/ai-harness-toolkit (11 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 123 tokens to every session and 4,945 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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