ralphctl: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/harness-principles/SKILL.md

harness-principles is a skill for Claude Code from lukas-grigis/ralphctl. It costs 93 tokens per session (525 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for making structural changes to an AI coding-task harness, meaning the code that organizes and supervises agent work. It requires checking the project's research and status before adding, removing, or redesigning flow components.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating flows, changing chain elements, redesigning the harness, adding sub-agents, changing evaluators, or upgrading the model.
Why use it?
It helps keep changes aligned with the project's tested design principles and prevents unnecessary layers or unsupported chain types.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: when-to-use in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

This is lukas-grigis/ralphctl's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on ralphctl itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything ralphctl configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to lukas-grigis/ralphctl. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lukas-grigis/ralphctl/main/.claude/skills/harness-principles/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/lukas-grigis/ralphctl

Made for: Claude Code.

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 harness-principles

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lukas-grigis/ralphctl/harness-principles.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/lukas-grigis/ralphctl/harness-principles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/lukas-grigis/ralphctl/harness-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lukas-grigis/ralphctl/harness-principles.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 525 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 $0.00093 $0.00525
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00262
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00105
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00052

Measured 7d ago against content hash af609907b546, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

harness-principles 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 7d 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.

.claude/skills/harness-principles/SKILL.md · 27 lines

What it actually says

Harness Principles — Auto-trigger

This skill exists because the harness research evolves with model capability. What was load-bearing in Opus 4.5 may be overhead in Opus 4.7. Without an explicit read-first gate, structural changes happen without awareness of the research behind the current design.

Before proceeding with any structural harness change:

  1. Read .claude/docs/HARNESS-PRINCIPLES.md in full.
  2. Identify the relevant principle section(s) by name (e.g. "§ 14 Minimal scaffolding", "§ 7 Idle watchdog").
  3. Note the current ralphctl status for each relevant principle (applied / partial / gap).
  4. Proceed with the change, keeping the principle's intent visible in the diff.

If you are removing a harness component, confirm which principle the component implements and verify the removal does not regress an applied row. If the removal moves a row from applied to gap, update HARNESS-PRINCIPLES.md as part of the same commit.

If you are adding a new chain primitive — there are five and only five: element (interface), leaf, sequential, loop, guard. Push back if a proposal adds a sixth. The principle behind this constraint is § 14 (Minimal scaffolding) and the rationale is in CLAUDE.md § Architecture invariants.

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. 7d ago First seen · 27 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A af609907b546

Subscribe to this mod's changes

harness-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository lukas-grigis/ralphctl (23 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 525 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.

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