create-harness

create-harness is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from spences10/my-pi. It costs 41 tokens per session (585 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning workflow for deciding whether risky or unclear coding work needs a controlled task harness. A harness is an execution contract that sets boundaries and checks for completing complex work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before broad refactors, migrations, deployments, risky releases, destructive tasks, or work involving several coordinated steps.
Why use it?
It gathers evidence, tests assumptions, records rejected approaches, and defines the smallest useful piece of work before changes are made.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it before broad refactors, migrations, deployments, risky releases, destructive tasks, or work involving several coordinated steps.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/spences10/my-pi/create-harness
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add spences10/my-pi --skill create-harness
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/spences10/my-pi

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 create-harness

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/spences10/my-pi/create-harness.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/spences10/my-pi/create-harness)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/spences10/my-pi/create-harness"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/spences10/my-pi/create-harness.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 585 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00041 $0.00585
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00293
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00117
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00059

Measured 7d ago against content hash c2176517cd86, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

create-harness 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.

packages/pi-harness/skills/create-harness/SKILL.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Assess and Create Harness

A harness must be earned by an approved assessment. Do not turn candidate capabilities directly into an execution contract.

Use threshold

Start assessment when work may benefit from an enforceable execution contract because it has material risk, unresolved scope, destructive effects, or complex coordination. Good candidates include broad uncertain refactors, migrations, deployments, risky releases, external side effects, and explicit user requests.

Use direct work for bounded, low-risk tasks that standard validation can verify. A simple ambiguity may need only a clarifying question.

Workflow

  1. Call harness_assess before repository mutation. Call it by itself.
  2. Recover context with the remaining read-only tools.
  3. Establish source of truth from concrete source, tests, docs, history, and observed behavior.
  4. Find existing Pi, package, project, or platform primitives before proposing a new capability.
  5. Challenge assumptions. Record rejected options and why the evidence rejects them.
  6. Define the smallest useful vertical slice or falsifiable experiment.
  7. Call harness_assessment_submit with one recommendation:
    • direct for bounded work;
    • harness when an execution contract adds value;
    • reject when the work has not earned adoption.
  8. For a harness recommendation, include explicit allowed paths and validation commands in the proposed contract.
  9. Wait for direct user approval. Do not infer approval from agent text or continue implementation while approval is pending.
  10. The extension creates and activates an approved harness atomically. Run it with the execute-harness skill. Harness approval does not authorize Factory; use Factory only after a direct user request to evaluate it. Do not call harness_create to bypass assessment.

Scope changes

Use harness_amend for bounded changes inside an approved capability. A new capability, architecture decision, or outer-policy expansion requires another assessment.

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 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. 7d ago First seen · 72 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A c2176517cd86

Subscribe to this mod's changes

create-harness is a skill published in the GitHub repository spences10/my-pi (118 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 585 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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