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harness-engineering

This skill should be used when designing autonomous agent harnesses: research loops, evaluation scaffolds, locked and editable surfaces, durable logs, novelty gates, pruning, rollback, PR preparation, and human approval boundaries.

skills/harness-engineering/SKILL.md

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# Harness Engineering

Harness engineering designs the control system around an agent: what it may edit, how it receives feedback, where it writes state, how failures recover, and who can approve irreversible actions. The harness is the difference between a helpful agent session and an autonomous loop that can run for days without corrupting its objective.

## When to Activate

Activate this skill when:

- Building autonomous research or experimentation loops
- Designing an agent environment with locked metrics and editable code or content
- Creating PR-producing or background agents
- Evaluating whether an agent can safely run without frequent human prompts
- Adding novelty, ablation, pruning, rollback, or durable logging to an agent workflow
- Preventing agents from gaming benchmarks, weakening rubrics, or losing state across compaction