skill
Harness engineering for Harness Kit primitives: skills, shared doctrine, provider roster, harness configs, gates, evals, bootstrap, and sync logic. Use for "improve the harness", "harness engineering", "bootstrap is wrong", "AGENTS.md is stale", "skill health", "skill usage", "undertriggering skill", "description tax", "eval skill", "sync primitives", "roster defaults". Trigger: /harness-engineering, /harness, /skill.
/harness-engineering
Harness engineering for Harness Kit primitives: skills, shared doctrine, provider roster, harness configs, gates, evals, bootstrap, and sync logic. Use for "improve the harness", "harness engineering", "bootstrap is wrong", "AGENTS.md is stale", "skill health", "skill usage", "undertriggering skill", "description tax", "eval skill", "sync primitives", "roster defaults". Trigger: /harness-engineering, /harness, /skill.
Maintain primitive in the Harness Kit operating loop.
This generated excerpt gives readers the beginning of the live primitive contract before they jump to GitHub.
Engineer the harness. Keep it thin.
## Route
| Need | Load |
|---|---|
| create global skill/agent | `references/mode-create.md` |
| eval skill | `references/mode-eval.md` |
| lint skill | `references/mode-lint.md` |
| apply skill-design lessons | `references/skill-design-principles.md` |
| clean Codex skill catalog | external `steipete-skill-cleaner` |
| convert agent/skill | `references/mode-convert.md` |
| sync externals | `references/mode-sync.md` |
| engineer doctrine/gates/hooks | `references/mode-engineer.md` |
| measure skill usage/health/staleness | `references/mode-audit.md` |
| open-model defaults | `references/open-model-roster.md` |
Use `/create-repo-skill` for generated repository-local skills such as bespoke
QA and persona acceptance probes. Use this skill when changing Harness Kit
itself. Use `/skill-cleaner` before catalog deletions, duplicate cleanup, or
description-budget work when the external `steipete-skill-cleaner` skill is
synced locally.
## Contract
- Fix root cause in the highest-leverage layer: type/test/hook/gate/skill/
AGENTS, in that order.
- Prefer deletion. Harness prose is context tax.
- Cross-harness first: Claude, Codex, Pi. Filesystem + `SKILL.md` is primary.
- Skills stay self-contained: scripts/references under the skill; state roots
from invoking repo.
- Treat a skill as a folder, not a markdown file. Use scripts, references,
examples, templates, assets, evals, or append-only data when prose would
make the agent reconstruct repeatable work.
- Harness Kit source skills live in `skills/`; repo-local `.agents/skills/` and
harness-specific skill bridge dirs are `/seed` output for consumer repos.
- Generated/root `AGENTS.md` is a router, not a manual. Keep non-obvious facts
only.
- System bootstrap exposes the full first-party skill catalog; repo-local
...