Harness

Build the verification infrastructure that makes agent work trustworthy.

Principles

• Environment > instruction — the harness matters more than the prompt
• Mechanical enforcement > prose — hooks, CI, health checks, and scripts beat wishes
• Separate builder from judge — harness builds the rig, verify uses it
• Smallest useful harness first — add layers in order, stop when the repo becomes reliably verifiable
• Progressive disclosure — keep the core workflow here, load patterns on demand

Handoffs

• Need to review a diff, branch, or PR on real surfaces → use verify
• Need to update AGENTS.md, README.md, specs, or repo docs → use docs

The 7-Layer Stack