harness-init

harness-init is a skill for Claude Code from oeftimie/vv-claude-harness. It costs 56 tokens per session (4,627 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A setup workflow for starting a project with the Long-Running Agent Harness, a system for tracking work across multiple coding sessions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Initializing feature tracking, capturing Git identity, creating harness files, adding build and quality gates, and optionally setting workflow-size guidance.
Why use it?
It records project context and adds hooks for builds and quality checks so later sessions can continue with shared information.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the vv-harness plugin — 6 skills, 7 agents, 5 hooks shipped together

Good fit Initializing feature tracking, capturing Git identity, creating harness files, adding build and quality gates, and optionally setting workflow-size guidance.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add oeftimie/vv-claude-harness
Claude Code
/plugin install vv-harness

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install vv-harness, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 7 agents, 5 hooks.

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/oeftimie/vv-claude-harness/harness-init/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/oeftimie/vv-claude-harness/harness-init)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oeftimie/vv-claude-harness/harness-init"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oeftimie/vv-claude-harness/harness-init/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for harness-init

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oeftimie/vv-claude-harness/harness-init"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oeftimie/vv-claude-harness/harness-init.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,627 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00056 $0.04627
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.02313
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00925
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00463

Measured 11d ago against content hash ef2258d5a2a9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

harness-init scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 11d 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.

Runs shell commandslowCapability

Expected in a hook, worth knowing in a rule or an instructions file.

out = subprocess.check_output(["claude", "--version"], stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL, text=True)
skills/harness-init/SKILL.md · 452 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 452 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Harness Initializer

Follow these steps in order. Do not skip steps. Ask the user when indicated.

Step 1: Gather Requirements

Ask the user (if not already provided):

  • What are you building? (brief description)
  • What's the tech stack? (language, framework, build tool)
  • Any existing code to preserve?

If the user provided this information in their initial message, proceed without asking.

Step 2: Capture Git Identity

git config user.name
git config user.email
ssh -T [email protected] 2>&1 || true
cat ~/.ssh/config 2>/dev/null | head -30

Record the active identity. Ask the user to confirm:

I detected:
- Git user: [name] <[email]>
- SSH identity: [key file or host alias]

Is this correct for this project? If you use multiple GitHub accounts, tell me which one this project belongs to.

Store the confirmed identity in .harness/harness.json.

Step 3: Create .harness/ Directory

Never hand-transcribe the framework-fixed files below into a project -- run ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/stamp.sh, which emits every one of them deterministically from an answers file. Adapted from Setlist's two-phase bootstrap doctrine (Alex Ciortan, CC BY 4.0): "Never hand-write what a stamp can emit; never stamp what a decision shapes."

First, confirm the build hook. If the detected stack is one of typescript, swift, python, go, or rust, show the user the exact PostToolUse hook the stamp is about to wire in (the content of skills/harness-init/templates/posttooluse-<stack>.json -- it catches type/build errors after edits without blocking the agent, since hooks run async) and wait for confirmation before continuing. Any other stack: say plainly that no PostToolUse hook is available for it, and proceed.

Write the answers file:

mkdir -p /tmp/vv-harness-stamp
cat > /tmp/vv-harness-stamp/answers.txt <<EOF
project_name=PROJECT_NAME
stack=DETECTED_OR_SPECIFIED_STACK
mode=new
EOF

mode=new is correct here; mode=upgrade exists in stamp.sh for re-stamping an existing project and is not used by this skill.

Read the full file on GitHub · 452 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. 11d ago First seen · 452 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A ef2258d5a2a9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

harness-init is a skill published in the GitHub repository oeftimie/vv-claude-harness (19 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 4,627 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (runs shell commands). 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

prowler-commit

Creates professional git commits following conventional-commits format. Trigger: When creating commits, after completing code changes, when user asks to commit.

prowler-cloud/prowler · 33 tokens

gh-auth-isolation

Safely manage multiple GitHub identities (EMU + personal) in agent workflows.

github/gh-aw · 20 tokens

comet-github

A routing guide for Comet-related GitHub work. It directs requests about pull requests, issues, CI failures, ideas, and fixes to the appropriate review or implementation process.

rpamis/comet · 72 tokens

github-skill

Work with GitHub via the gh CLI — clone repositories, create/list/merge pull requests, create/list issues, and run any other gh command (API calls, workflow runs, releases, repo administration). List operations return parsed JSON.

zeenie-ai/OpenCompany · 51 tokens

re0-merge

Review and land an external contribution the way this suite does: gate it against the thesis, land it with the author's credit intact, complete a new skill rather than merging it raw, then approve, credit, and explain before closing. Use when reviewing a pull request, as any collaborator or maintainer, not only the…

LilMGenius/paperthin · 70 tokens

nvca-chart-release

Release NVCA Operator chart changes from the native monorepo source to the vendored Helm chart. Use when updating the vendored NVCA Operator chart, changing NVCA image refs, publishing helm-nvca-operator, or validating the chart against a self-managed control plane.

NVIDIA/nvcf · 61 tokens