harness-init

harness-init is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from manhua-man/harness-coding-protocol. It costs 53 tokens per session (6,109 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A repository setup workflow that reads a project and drafts its core guidance files. After one confirmation, it can write files such as AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, DESIGN.md, and steering recommendations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to bootstrap an existing repository with facts, collaboration rules, design guidance, and local recommendations.
Why use it?
It gives coding agents project-specific instructions without requiring Node.js, npm, npx, or another project runtime, while keeping changes under your control.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the harness-coding-protocol plugin — 4 skills, 4 commands 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/manhua-man/harness-coding-protocol/harness-init
Any agent
npx skills add manhua-man/harness-coding-protocol --skill harness-init
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/manhua-man/harness-coding-protocol

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install harness-coding-protocol, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills, 4 commands.

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-init

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/manhua-man/harness-coding-protocol/harness-init.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/manhua-man/harness-coding-protocol/harness-init)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/manhua-man/harness-coding-protocol/harness-init"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/manhua-man/harness-coding-protocol/harness-init.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 53 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,109 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 $0.00053 $0.06109
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.03054
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.01222
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00611

Measured 4d ago against content hash 86f897858a95, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

harness-init 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 4d 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.

ai-ide/skills/harness-init/SKILL.md · 386 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 386 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Harness Init — agent-native

You are the IDE_Agent. /harness-init runs in five phases against the user's target repository:

Phase 1 — Ground → Phase 2 — Read → Phase 3 — Judge & Write Drafts → Phase 4 — Show & Confirm → Phase 5 — Apply

All five phases are agent-native. Do not require Node.js, npm, npx, tsx, a package manager, or a project-local runtime. You read the project, judge what each Root_Truth_File should say, produce Drafts in working memory, ask for one confirmation, and then write only the confirmed Root_Truth_Files. Nothing lands on disk until the user types yes in Phase 4.

If the user supplied a project path argument, use it. Otherwise, use the current working directory.


Targets (Root_Truth_Files)

You write only these Root_Truth_File targets, treated as agent outputs (no template-only bytes):

  1. <target>/AGENTS.md — project facts

  2. <target>/CLAUDE.md — collaboration protocol

  3. <target>/DESIGN.md — product, visual, interaction, brand, content, or DX design system; conditional, see DESIGN gate below

  4. <target>/steering/harness-recommendations.md — local steering overrides; conditional, see steering gate below

  5. Optional Cursor adapter (one logical Root_Truth_File, two physical paths) — only when .cursor/ is already present or the user asks for Cursor rules:

    • <target>/.cursor/rules/harness.mdc
    • <target>/.cursor/commands/harness-init.md

    Slash commands in target repos: this plugin ships ai-ide/commands/ and ai-ide/skills/. In a target repo, the user chooses where IDE slash commands live (ai-ide/commands/, commands/, .cursor/commands/, .claude/commands/, etc.). Do not scaffold duplicate command trees across paths unless the user requests it. Reference the chosen path from AGENTS.md; skip the Cursor pair when .cursor/ is absent and the user keeps commands elsewhere.

You write nothing else. Anything outside this set is forbidden (see Anti-Patterns below). Conditional targets still appear in the Phase 4 summary as create, patch-section, overwrite, or skip.

Read the full file on GitHub · 386 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 386 lines · 53 tokens per session scan A 86f897858a95

Subscribe to this mod's changes

harness-init is a skill published in the GitHub repository manhua-man/harness-coding-protocol (5 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 53 tokens to every session and 6,109 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 2026-08-31.

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