harness

A workflow coordinator that moves work through an 11-phase software-development process. It pauses at approval points and can choose between one agent or several cooperating agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps coordinate implementation phases, run test-driven development (writing tests to guide the code), retry integration after failures, and stop cleanly when work is done or needs a decision.
Why use it?
It keeps multi-step development work moving in order while asking for consent when a decision or commit is needed.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/friedbotstudio/baseline/harness
Any agent
npx skills add friedbotstudio/baseline --skill harness
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/friedbotstudio/baseline

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 110 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 11,259 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00110 $0.11259
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.05629
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.02252
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.01126

Measured 2d ago against content hash 378e6fdc3bdb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 34 executable files (assemble-context.mjs, changed-files-shape.mjs, checker-fanout.mjs, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/skills/harness/SKILL.md · 248 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 248 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

harness — workflow orchestrator with internal loop

User-invokable and model-invokable. The harness chains the 11-phase pipeline by looping internally through non-gated phases until the loop hits one of four exit conditions: consent gate, phase-skill failure, integrate-failure-needs-spec-change, or workflow done. The user types only at consent gates (/approve-direction, /approve-swarm, /grant-commit) and at integrate-failure decisions that need a spec change.

Internal loop atomicity (the contract)

A single Skill(harness) invocation loops through every non-gated phase boundary in one user turn. Inside the loop, each iteration invokes exactly one phase skill via the Skill tool, updates state and TaskList, then re-enters the loop. The loop exits — and the model emits its terminal message — only when one of these four conditions holds:

  • Yield: the next pending task carries metadata.needs_user: true (consent gate, or integrate-failure-needs-spec-change). Write harness_state: yielded; surface the gate; exit.
  • Phase-skill failure: a Skill(<phase>) call returned error. Write harness_state: yielded with reason: "<phase> failed: <summary>"; surface; exit.
  • Done: workflow.json → completed now contains every non-excepted phase. Write harness_state: done; surface completion; exit.
  • (Rare) Mid-loop interruption: the model decides to stop emitting before any of the above (context pressure, runtime limit, external interruption). The on-disk state stays state: continue with the marker present — the Stop hook safety net handles this.

.claude/state/harness_state is flat JSON with one of four states:

  • continue — the harness is in the loop body (or was interrupted mid-loop). The Stop hook safety net is armed.
  • yielded — the loop exited cleanly at a gate or failure. Stop hook stays silent.
  • done — the loop exited cleanly at workflow completion. Stop hook stays silent.
  • parked — a caller owns this session and the loop is not to be resumed. Stop hook stays silent, and stays silent even with the marker present, because a park happens inside an armed loop. Preflight step 6 clears it on the next /harness.

Read the full file on GitHub · 248 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. 2d ago First seen · 248 lines · 110 tokens per session scan A 378e6fdc3bdb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

harness is a skill published in the GitHub repository friedbotstudio/baseline (11 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 110 tokens to every session and 11,259 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 2026-08-30.