Audit Harness

Audit Harness

HARNESS.md is mission-critical. Audit it with zero tolerance.

Trigger

Use this skill when the user asks to:

• audit HARNESS.md
• verify harness accuracy
• run pre-commit or pre-push hooks manually
• confirm architecture or CI gates
• explain what actually enforces the harness

Hard Rules

• Treat any mismatch, omission, skipped gate, auto-fix, or failing check as a critical failure.
• Never describe results as "mostly passing", "just one failure", or equivalent minimization.
• State the exact failure first.
• Explain the finding before changing code or docs.
• Do not proceed with a fix until the user tells you to proceed.
• During harness audits, never use make check, scripts/run_gates.py, or any loop/script wrapper as the primary audit path.
• Run checks manually, one by one, in the same order they appear in the source-of-truth config.
• If a hook modifies files, report the exact files immediately.
• Do not revert hook changes unless the user explicitly asks.

Source Of Truth Order

Read these first:

1. HARNESS.md
2. .pre-commit-config.yaml
3. Makefile
4. tests/test_dependency_layers.py
5. scripts/grimp_layers_report.py
6. .github/workflows/*.yml
7. docs/git/practices.md
8. AGENTS.md

Manual Audit Procedure

Pre-commit

1. Enumerate the active pre-commit hooks from .pre-commit-config.yaml.
2. Start at the top.
3. Run each hook manually:

uv run pre-commit run <hook-id> --all-files

4. After each hook: state Passed, Failed, Skipped, or Modified files.
5. If a hook fails, stop and explain why before proposing a fix.

Pre-push

1. Enumerate the active pre-push hooks from .pre-commit-config.yaml.
2. Run each one manually, one by one:

uv run pre-commit run <hook-id> --hook-stage pre-push --all-files

3. Treat any failure as critical.

Architecture

• tests/test_dependency_layers.py is the source of truth for grimp enforcement.
• scripts/grimp_layers_report.py is report generation only.
• scripts/run_gates.py is supplemental only and not canonical.

CI/CD

For each workflow, label it clearly as one of:

• local source of truth
• local supplemental check
• CI enforcement
• CI artifact generation
• CI report / issue automation

If wording in HARNESS.md hides an important behavior, call that a critical documentation failure.

Response Style

• Be short.
• Be exact.
• One failure is a critical failure.
• Do not soften language.