harness-continue

Harness Continue

Step 1: Orient Yourself

The vv-harness plugin's SessionStart hook auto-injects orientation at session start: feature summary, next claimable feature, last handoff, Active Context, a git identity warning on mismatch, and any SESSION_INCOMPLETE gaps from the previous session. Use that injected "## Harness orientation" block instead of re-reading the harness files. Resolve any SESSION_INCOMPLETE gaps it surfaces before starting new work.

This skill covers what the hook does not: mode choice, the smoke test, and workflow planning.

Check for untracked files and inherited task quality:

git status -s          # surface unknown untracked files

If you see untracked files you didn't create (e.g., notes.md, scratch files), surface them to the user immediately: "I see [file] untracked — should I delete it, gitignore it, or leave it?" This takes 5 seconds and prevents orphaned file accumulation.

If inheriting tasks from a previous session, verify they have required metadata fields (feature_id at minimum) via TaskList. Tasks without feature_id can't be correlated by hooks or retrospectives. Update them with TaskUpdate now if they're missing it.

Step 2: Verify Git Identity

The SessionStart hook already compared git config user.email against .harness/harness.json and warned on mismatch (non-blocking). If the orientation block shows an identity warning, fix it before proceeding. Also verify the SSH identity, which the hook does not check:

ssh -T [email protected] 2>&1 || true

Do not skip this.

Step 2.5: Smoke Test

Run the project's build/test smoke test:

./.harness/init.sh smoke_test

This is a gate, not a diagnostic. Its purpose is to confirm the environment is in a known-good state BEFORE any changes. If it fails, you know the problem is pre-existing, not something you introduced. Run it within the first 5 actions of every session. No exceptions. The 15-second cost prevents 15-minute debugging sessions later. (OVI-106: init.sh's own default target is full_test, not smoke_test -- pass the argument explicitly, or this step silently runs the full suite instead of the fast gate this section describes.)