agent-harness-construction

agent-harness-construction is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ufy2024/AuC. It costs 25 tokens per session (517 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for designing the actions, tool definitions, and information shown to an AI agent while it works.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps define tool inputs and outputs, choose the right tool size, report files and next steps, and specify safe retry and stopping rules.
Why use it?
It helps prevent agents from getting lost, misreading tool results, or failing to recover from errors.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit It helps define tool inputs and outputs, choose the right tool size, report files and next steps, and specify safe retry and stopping rules.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ufy2024/auc/agent-harness-construction
View source ↗ ufy2024/AuC
About the project

AuC is a Python framework for running a single AI agent with an asynchronous, pluggable reasoning loop, language-model adapters, permission levels, and observable events. It is used to build coding and conversational agents with tools, security checks, web interfaces, background jobs, evaluations, and isolated execution. The catalogue entries are skills for extending its agent workflow.

ufy2024/AuC · 1,090 stars · on GitHub

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 ufy2024/AuC --skill agent-harness-construction
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ufy2024/AuC

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 agent-harness-construction

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ufy2024/auc/agent-harness-construction.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ufy2024/auc/agent-harness-construction)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ufy2024/auc/agent-harness-construction"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ufy2024/auc/agent-harness-construction.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 517 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Agent Snooping · line 20
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
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 $0.00025 $0.00517
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00259
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00103
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00052

Measured 8d ago against content hash aa33a6755696, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-harness-construction 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 8d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

auc/skill_library/bundled/agent-harness-construction/SKILL.md · 94 lines

What it actually says

Agent Harness Construction

Use this skill when you are improving how an agent plans, calls tools, recovers from errors, and converges on completion.

Core Model

Agent output quality is constrained by:

  1. Action space quality
  2. Observation quality
  3. Recovery quality
  4. Context budget quality

Action Space Design

  1. Use stable, explicit tool names.
  2. Keep inputs schema-first and narrow.
  3. Return deterministic output shapes.
  4. Avoid catch-all tools unless isolation is impossible.

Granularity Rules

  • Use micro-tools for high-risk operations (deploy, migration, permissions).
  • Use medium tools for common edit/read/search loops.
  • Use macro-tools only when round-trip overhead is the dominant cost.

Observation Design

Every tool response should include:

  • status: success|warning|error
  • summary: one-line result
  • next_actions: actionable follow-ups
  • artifacts: file paths / IDs

Error Recovery Contract

For every error path, include:

  • root cause hint
  • safe retry instruction
  • explicit stop condition

Context Budgeting

  1. Keep system prompt minimal and invariant.
  2. Move large guidance into skills loaded on demand.
  3. Prefer references to files over inlining long documents.
  4. Compact at phase boundaries, not arbitrary token thresholds.

Architecture Pattern Guidance

  • ReAct: best for exploratory tasks with uncertain path.
  • Function-calling: best for structured deterministic flows.
  • Hybrid (recommended): ReAct planning + typed tool execution.

Benchmarking

Track:

  • completion rate
  • retries per task
  • pass@1 and pass@3
  • cost per successful task

Anti-Patterns

  • Too many tools with overlapping semantics.
  • Opaque tool output with no recovery hints.
  • Error-only output without next steps.
  • Context overloading with irrelevant references.
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. 8d ago First seen · 94 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A aa33a6755696

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-harness-construction is a skill published in the GitHub repository ufy2024/AuC (1,090 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 517 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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