harness-1-boot
harness-1-boot
The Boot stage of the harness loop. Run it at session start to confirm the engineering harness is healthy and to report where it sits on the maturity curve. Two modes: --validate (run the live Boot → Interact → Observe checks) and --status (read-only maturity report).
The harness IS the product. Development infrastructure — CLI tools, build scripts, test harnesses,
just/makerecipes, seed scripts, environment setup, plus the agent-facing Boot/Interact/Observe loop on top — is not scaffolding. It is the first-class product of engineering work. Boot exists because if a brand-new agent session can't reach a healthy, observable running system in 30-60 seconds using only the governance doc, that is the most important thing to fix before any feature work. Every "no" here is harness work to do.
Engineering harness governance: docs/project-rules/engineering-harness.md (canonical). Legacy names docs/project-rules/agent-harness.md and docs/project-rules/harness.md are still read as fallbacks for projects that haven't migrated — see Step 0 for the read order. This skill never creates the governance doc; provisioning it is the separate engineering-harness setup effort's job. If it is absent, boot degrades gracefully (reports UNAVAILABLE) rather than blocking the session.
Layering: the agent-facing Boot/Interact/Observe loop sits on top of the engineering substrate (the project's justfile/Makefile/package.json scripts.dev boot command, test runner, etc.). The Boot command the governance doc records IS the engineering harness substrate. If no substrate exists, the verdict is UNAVAILABLE — Boot can't work without something to boot.
Signal readiness: Boot reports more than "can the process start?" It also checks whether the harness exposes enough deterministic signals for a human or agent to prove behavior without inference: runtime inspectability, smoke paths, architecture/static checks, security/dependency/schema checks, evidence paths, and known back-pressure gaps. Missing signals are improvement candidates, not blockers or scores.