using-the-harness

using-the-harness is a skill for Claude Code from jpantsjoha/ai-native-developer-experience. It costs 63 tokens per session (1,338 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of working rules for a shared human-and-AI software repository. It explains how to assess risk, confirm permission, choose relevant skills, and define finished work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the start of a session to read the project rules, classify requested work, select the right skill, and check the required approvals before acting.
Why use it?
It gives a team a common way to decide what an agent may do and what evidence is needed. This reduces mistakes caused by unclear authority or inconsistent procedures.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Part of the join-the-team plugin — 21 skills, 3 commands, 1 hook shipped together

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/jpantsjoha/ai-native-developer-experience/using-the-harness
Any agent
npx skills add jpantsjoha/ai-native-developer-experience --skill using-the-harness
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jpantsjoha/ai-native-developer-experience

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install join-the-team, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 skills, 3 commands, 1 hook.

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 using-the-harness

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpantsjoha/ai-native-developer-experience/using-the-harness.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpantsjoha/ai-native-developer-experience/using-the-harness)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpantsjoha/ai-native-developer-experience/using-the-harness"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpantsjoha/ai-native-developer-experience/using-the-harness.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 63 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,338 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 5.1 $0.00063 $0.01338
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00669
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00268
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00134

Measured 5d ago against content hash 307945b1ab90, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

using-the-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 5d 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/using-the-harness/SKILL.md · 100 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 100 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Using the Harness

This is a team operating harness: one shared contract for humans and AI agents working in the same repository — same rules, same risk tiers, same evidence, same definition of done. It exists to make a mixed human–AI team coherent, not to make one agent faster.

A skill supplies a repeatable procedure. It never supplies permission or accountability.

First actions, every session

  1. Ground in the contract. If this project has adopted the operating model, read its project profile before anything else (docs/operating-model/PROJECT-OPERATING-PROFILE.md), then the manual it binds. Profile facts beat inference.
  2. Classify risk before acting. Map the requested work to R0–R3. Round ambiguity upward. Confirm authority at that tier before any consequential, destructive, external, or credential-touching action.
  3. Route before doing. Check the routing table below. If a skill applies to the work, use it. If you are unsure which applies, use delivery-orchestrator.

Core invariants — not negotiable

  • Classify risk before confirming authority. Approval is scoped to actual risk.
  • Infer intent; never infer permission. Useful intent is not a grant of authority.
  • Receipts, not polish. Produce an artefact or a pass/fail verdict, not a narrative.
  • Review binds to the exact candidate. Any change after review invalidates it.
  • seed is not active. A seed profile supports design and R0/R1 work only.
  • Never invent a project fact. Unknowns get an owner and a resolving trigger.
  • Insufficient evidence is a stop, not a prompt to improvise. Tag the roster role that owns the decision; silence never converts to permission.

Skill routing

Work in front of you Skill
New repo, or operating model install/repair operating-model-bootstrap
Multi-track epic, or "which skill applies?" delivery-orchestrator
Significant technical decision or ADR the-architect
New feature, epic, or change — plan before code spec-first-delivery
High-stakes decision, or before claiming done adversarial-gate
Agent output feeding a decision, store, or another agent domain-validator
Any PR or agent-generated code before commit pr-reviewer
Anything about to ship to a real environment release-readiness
CI triggers, Actions billing, issues, labels, branch protection, or release-tag workflow github-manager
Release process governance: SemVer, ADR, changelog, release authority release-manager
Enterprise policy, compliance, governance, or approved-vendor alignment governance-guardrail
Status, standup, or situation report sitrep
Plugin-directory, marketplace, or curated-list submission plugin-submission
LLM/cloud cost estimate or architecture with LLM calls cost-guardrail
Google ADK multi-agent design adk-expert
Any cloud-vendor workload gcp-expert / aws-expert / azure-expert / alibaba-expert (the-architect routes)
Adding or reviewing an MCP server mcp-server-scaffold

Read the full file on GitHub · 100 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 100 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A 307945b1ab90

Subscribe to this mod's changes

using-the-harness is a skill published in the GitHub repository jpantsjoha/ai-native-developer-experience (11 stars, last pushed 29d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 1,338 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories