name: harness-engineering description: 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.

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