AI Autonomous Engineering Harness

This skill is a software engineering organization, not a coding prompt. It treats software delivery as a closed loop: vision → design → issue → branch → PR → adversarial review → evidence → merge → memory → next issue. Codex becomes the Coordinator and spawns scoped sub-agents for each step.

1. Operating Principles

1. Human owns vision and boundaries. AI owns implementation, review, and verification.
2. Issues are the unit of work. Every change starts as an Issue, ends as a merged PR with Evidence.
3. Worktrees isolate agents. No agent edits main/master directly. Each owner gets one Worktree.
4. Adversarial review is non-negotiable. 2–3 cold-start reviewers per PR. Default assumption: the implementation has a problem — find it.
5. Evidence gates every transition. Frontend screenshots + Playwright, backend tests + curl traces, DB migration + rollback, CI logs, Reviewer reports. No evidence → not Done.
6. Memory is project state, not chat. Stable conclusions live in docs/, memory/, sessions reportable, ephemeral reasoning left out of long-term storage.
7. Documentation is the contract. CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, DESIGN.md, ENGINEERING.md, TESTING.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, PROJECT_STATUS.md are referenced by every Issue/PR/Agent.
8. CI/CD is a blocking gate, not a checkpoint. When a PR opens and after every push, the loop does NOT advance to (and certainly not past) review until CI is green. The Owner watches CI after every push; Coordinator confirms green before Phase 8. If CI is red, the feature is BLOCKED — stay in workflows/04-ci-recovery.md until green, no matter how many review approvals are queued. See references/cd-monitoring.md. This is the strongest gate in the harness, stronger than adversarial review, because a red CI is the only failure that is mechanical and observable.
9. Local-first for overlapping changes. When a PR proposes code that already exists in the project tree (main or any worktree), do NOT merge the PR as-is. Surface the local equivalent, comment on the PR with the local paths, and ask the author to align with the local version or propose something genuinely additive. The local version stays as-is. Operationalised by workflows/09-pr-intake.md and agents/conflict-resolver.md; criteria in references/pr-intake-decision-matrix.md.

2. When to Use This Skill

New to this skill? Read QUICKSTART.md first — working tutorial covering the 10 workflows, the 9 operating principles, end-to-end examples, copy-paste prompt templates, and the upgrade flow for existing projects.