Better Harness is an open-source platform for studying and improving how coding agents work on tasks, using written harnesses, controlled tests, and evidence from projects and sessions. Coding teams use it to identify workflow problems and turn them into prioritized improvements and verifiable next steps. Its catalogue entries extend coding-agent workflows for supported hosts such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to QoderAI/better-harness. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/QoderAI/better-harness/main/.agents/skills/change-traceability-review/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/QoderAI/better-harnessWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/qoderai/better-harness/change-traceability-review)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/qoderai/better-harness/change-traceability-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/qoderai/better-harness/change-traceability-review.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00072 | $0.00488 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00036 | $0.00244 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00014 | $0.00098 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00049 |
Grade A, and why
change-traceability-review 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.
What it actually says
Change Traceability Review
Review the traceability behind a change, not code style: Story or issue -> Spec -> plan/tasks -> commit/branch/PR -> diff -> tests -> risk. Default to Chinese and keep the report compact and decision-oriented. Treat specs as the review source of truth; code is acceptable when it clearly serves the spec.
Modes
- Spec Preparation: before implementation or commit, create or tighten a Story-linked spec and define acceptance scenarios, plan/tasks, tests, and risk evidence that later commits can cite. Load Spec Contract.
- Review Readiness Check: inspect the current diff, staged diff, PR text, branch, or selected commits before review/merge. Load Mode Rules and Reporting.
- Review Retrospective: inspect recent history, usually latest 30 commits. Identify commit-message habits, weak traceability, missing Spec/Test/Risk evidence, oversized or mixed-scope commits, spec-doc patterns, and rework signals. Load Mode Rules and Reporting.
Entry and Routing
- Identify the mode from the user's request or the current review surface.
- Read repo instructions first: nearest
AGENTS.md, plugin manifests, and the target spec or diff. - Gather bounded local evidence using Evidence Commands.
- Apply the relevant contract:
- Spec Preparation: Spec Contract
- Commits: Commit Contract
- Any review: Mode Rules
- Produce the report using Reporting.
Keep generated helpers and local experiments outside SKILL.md unless they are
durable resources the skill must use.
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.
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.
- 7d ago First seen · 42 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 96bcd83886f5
change-traceability-review is a skill published in the GitHub repository QoderAI/better-harness (2,168 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 488 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
gentle-ai-collab-perfect
Trigger: contributing to Gentleman-Programming/gentle-ai as an external collaborator. Strict issue-first workflow, honest PR bodies, contributor-vs-maintainer scope, chained-PR strategy, verification protocol, docstring coverage. Load whenever the active repo is Gentleman-Programming/gentle-ai and any part of the…
branch-pr
Create Gentle AI pull requests with issue-first checks. Trigger: creating, opening, or preparing PRs for review.
work-unit-commits
Plan commits as reviewable work units. Trigger: implementation, commit splitting, chained PRs, or keeping tests and docs with code.
chained-pr
Trigger: PRs over 400 lines, stacked PRs, review slices. Split oversized changes into chained PRs that protect review focus.
comet-github-pr-review
A read-only review process for pull requests in Comet's GitHub repositories. A pull request is a proposed code change; the review checks its current code, related issue, comments, merge status, and automated checks.
pre-publish-review
Nuclear-grade 12-agent pre-publish release gate. Runs /get-unpublished-changes to detect all changes since last npm release, spawns up to 10 ultrabrain agents for deep per-change analysis, invokes /review-work (orchestrator manual QA plus one gate reviewer) for holistic review, and 1 oracle for overall release…