agentic-harness: Skill for Claude Code

Ship PR

You are about to ship the current branch as a pull request. The user has done the work; you are doing the handoff.

This skill is the worked example from the Harness Engineering article. It demonstrates the deterministic-where-possible / LLM-where-needed split: the script does the mechanical steps; you do the judgement steps (writing the PR body, deciding whether to ship at all).

Step 0 — Sanity checks

Before doing anything, verify:

# 1. We're in a git repo
git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree

# 2. The current branch is not the base branch
CURRENT=$(git branch --show-current)
BASE="${1:-dev}"  # Default base from $ARGUMENTS, fallback to "dev"
# If your default base is "main", change the fallback above.
[ "$CURRENT" != "$BASE" ] || { echo "Refusing to ship: current branch is the base branch."; exit 1; }

# 3. The branch has at least one commit ahead of base
AHEAD=$(git rev-list --count "$BASE".."$CURRENT")
[ "$AHEAD" -gt 0 ] || { echo "Refusing to ship: branch has 0 commits ahead of $BASE."; exit 1; }

# 4. gh CLI is installed and authenticated
gh auth status

If any check fails, stop and report. Do not try to fix the underlying issue without explicit confirmation.

Step 1 — Run the deterministic part

.claude/skills/ship-pr/scripts/run-tests.sh

That script formats code, runs the test suite, and exits non-zero on any failure. If it exits non-zero, stop. Read the output, report the failure, and ask the user what to do. Do not retry, do not disable tests, do not push anyway.

This is the line you will not cross: never use --no-verify, never skip a failing test, never push known-broken code.

Step 2 — Stage and commit any uncommitted work

# Show the user what's about to be committed
git status --short
git diff --stat

If there are uncommitted changes:

1. Read the diff (don't just stage everything blindly)
2. Decide whether the changes belong in this PR or not. If they don't, ask
3. If they do: stage explicit files (git add <file1> <file2>), not git add -A
4. Write a commit message following .claude/rules/conventions.md (Conventional Commits format)
5. Commit