harness-engineering

Harness Engineering — remediation recipes

You are improving this repository's AI harness: the guides, sensors, and guardrails that make agent work reliable. The authoritative reference is https://paladini.github.io/harness-score/ — these recipes summarize it.

Ground rules

• Prefer running npx -y harness-score . --json first (and after changes) so improvements are measured, not assumed.
• Fix in points order: the failed checks worth the most points first, unless the user picks specific ones.
• Write harness files that match THIS repository — read the codebase enough to state real commands, real directories, real conventions. Never ship placeholder text like "".
• Keep context lean: AGENTS.md ≤150 lines; scope guidance where the tool supports it; put procedures in skills, not rules.

Recipes by check family

CTX — Context & Guides

Create AGENTS.md with: what the project is (2 sentences), directory layout, exact build/test/lint commands, non-negotiable conventions, and a "do not touch" list.

For guidance scoped to part of the tree, add a nested CLAUDE.md inside that subdirectory — Claude Code loads it automatically when working in that subtree, the same idea as glob-scoped rules in other tools, just directory-scoped instead of pattern-scoped.

SKL — Skills & Commands

For the team's most repeated procedure, create .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md with frontmatter name: and a description: written as a trigger ("Use when the user asks to …", ≥40 chars), body = numbered runbook. Add .claude/commands/<verb>.md for human-triggered workflows like /review.

HKS — Hooks & Guardrails

Register hooks in .claude/settings.json's "hooks" key:

{
  "hooks": {
    "PreToolUse": [
      {
        "matcher": "Bash",
        "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/.claude/hooks/guard-shell.js" }]
      }
    ],
    "PostToolUse": [
      {
        "matcher": "Edit|Write",
        "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/.claude/hooks/format-on-edit.js" }]
      }
    ]
  }
}