Harness Authoring

Harness Authoring

You are writing instructions for a future you with no memory of today. Optimize for that reader: terse, falsifiable, triggered at the right moment.

Before writing anything

1. Duplication check: grep -ri <topic> skills/ commands/ agents/ CLAUDE.md. If a near-match exists, STRENGTHEN it (and bump its provenance) instead of adding a sibling. Two overlapping skills split the trigger and both rot.
2. Adopt-vs-rebuild gate (the dup check at FLEET scale): before building or porting a capability a SIBLING/PARENT harness already implements, STOP — grep the sibling harnesses too, not just this repo. Run the comparison, then put an explicit choice to the USER — adopt/vendor the sibling's artifact (skill vendoring-skills), let it flow via the master-harness consolidation, or rebuild here — and get a BUILD decision before writing code. A predict-first that only scores the port's mechanics (additive? lint-clean?) is NOT a build decision; predict the strategic question ("is a competing copy worth maintaining in this trunk?"). Kernel directive 6: never fork the brain. Resolve lineage DIRECTION first: a consolidation/aggregate harness is usually DOWNSTREAM (it syncs FROM this repo), so building a capability INTO it forks the brain, while building it in the upstream parent is legitimate and flows down. (session 7d2da048, 2026-06-21: master-harness looked adoptable until its LINEAGE.md showed it consolidates recursive+fable — the adopt call flipped to rebuild-native+graft.) (session a0a4278d, 2026-06-14: ported fable's competitor-scan into a new recursive competitive-research skill, commit b948a8a; the user then cancelled the whole effort — fable's was better "in every way" — so the port was sunk work the gate would have prevented.)
3. Right artifact check: re-run the routing-learnings tree. The most common authoring error is writing a skill for what should be a hook. Before proposing an enforcement GATE, grep ADRs + test docstrings + memory/decisions/ for whether it SHOULD gate — reversing a recorded "advisory, not a blocker" choice is reward-hack-adjacent, and an auditor catches it (edd67875: a CI drift-guard contradicted test_atlas.py's ritual line).
4. Source-of-truth gate (artifacts asserting external behavior): if the artifact states facts about an external process, tool, or environment — CLI behavior, where files live, how cleanup works, what a hook blocks — verify each load-bearing claim against the authoritative source (live docs via WebFetch, and/or an empirical test) BEFORE shipping, not after. Porting a sibling-repo skill does NOT inherit verification — its facts were true in the OTHER repo. (session 9147f304, 2026-06-14: ported the worktree skill and opened PR #14 before reading the live Claude Code docs the skill's own §5 mandated; shipped a false guard-hook claim a user-requested second pass caught.) A digest from a fan-out / background research workflow (Discover→Read→Synthesize) is NOT grounding: an empty fetch phase still returns a fluent, confident summary written from training memory, with no signal of failure. Before trusting or relaying one, read its provenance counters (urlsRead / sources / pages-read); if zero sources were read, DISCARD the synthesis and fetch directly. (session 5af1bbc4, 2026-06-18: a read-skills-docs workflow returned a full docs digest with urlsRead:[] / "Discovered 0 canonical doc URLs"; only that field exposed the fabrication.) The same gate covers claims about the HARNESS'S OWN code, not just external tools: any "X is shared by / already wired to / consumed by Y" sentence in a plan, proposal, or PR body is a FACTUAL claim a fresh-context auditor WILL check against the call sites. Grep the call sites first and write the present-tense truth ("fleet is the FIRST consumer; the ledger migration is separate work"), never the intended end-state as if it already shipped. When an audit returns "revise" on an over-claim, the fix must RE-SWEEP the whole artifact for the same claim-class before re-submitting — one over-claim found means look for its siblings. (session 453daf00, 2026-06-22: a plan asserted a new state-resolver was "shared by the existing ledgers" when only one caller used it; the agent fixed one sentence after audit-1 but the v2 plan still carried the claim, caught only by audit-2 — prediction 87b42efa MISS.)

Budgets (lint-enforced — they are quality pressure, not bureaucracy)

• Skill description <= 600 chars. It's always-loaded; every char taxes every session forever. Make it pushy about WHEN to trigger (skills under-trigger by default), concrete about contexts, and include the cost of not using it.
• Skill body <= 200 lines; overflow goes to references/ with explicit "read references/X.md when Y" pointers. CLAUDE.md <= 60 lines. Commands/agents <= 80.

Required in every artifact

• provenance: line — date, session id(s), triggering event. Rules without receipts get deleted by the next /meta-retro, as they should.
• Falsifiable content. "Be careful with the database" is decoration; "run migrations in a transaction; the 2026-05 incident was a half-applied migration" is a learning.
• One name per concept. Name each concept ONCE and reuse that exact token throughout the artifact (and across siblings that share it) — never alternate synonyms ("Stop gate"/"retro gate", "blackboard"/"ledger", RESUME.md vs HANDOFF.md). A reader with no memory of today cannot tell whether two names mean two things; terminology drift was the single recurring defect across the 2026-06-17 skill audit. (followup a4f372.)

Enforcement exemptions (lint / hook rules)

An exemption to a lint or hook rule MUST be a human-gated allowlist edited only via /harness-pr (e.g. SEED_ARTIFACTS, VENDORED_SKILLS) — NEVER a field the checked artifact can set on itself (frontmatter flag, marker line, env var). A self-assertable exemption silently turns the rule into opt-out for the whole tree. If an artifact must carry a human-readable marker, keep it inert and make the linter ignore it; always surface the waiver in lint output, never skip silently. (session 61f58113, 2026-06-13: a self-asserted vendored: true B3 waiver was caught by the harness-auditor as a backdoor, then replaced with a path allowlist. session c32fdd41, 2026-06-17: a self-assertable HARNESS_SESSION_TTL_SECONDS env override in Guard B let any second session set the staleness TTL to ~0 to evict the live owner — same class, caught again by the harness-auditor, removed for a fixed compile-time TTL.) A tunable that moves a guard's eviction/staleness threshold is itself enforcement-relevant — make it a constant, not env-readable.

Mentioning the enforcement marker in a commit/PR body

When a commit message or PR body must MENTION the enforcement-unlock marker token (quoting directive 5, an ADR, or a guard's own message), never put that literal token in the Bash command line — the enforcement guard's prose-scan reads it as a self-grant and BLOCKS the command. Write the body to a temp file and pass it by reference: git commit -F FILE / gh pr create --body-file FILE, which keeps the token out of the command text. (session 6390db39, 2026-06-19: an inline heredoc that quoted the marker was blocked; the guard's own block message gave the fix.)

Per-type notes

• Agents: define what context they get — and what they must NOT get. Any agent that evaluates your work must receive only the original request + rubric + artifact paths. Sharing your reasoning contaminates the verdict.
• Hooks: stdin JSON in, exit 0/2 out, fail OPEN on malformed input (a broken hook must never brick the session), narrowest possible matcher, and always propose via PR — the guard will (correctly) block direct edits. When a hook keys on a path that ENCODES identity (e.g. .claude/worktrees/<name>), canonicalize LEXICALLY (abspath + normcase + textual \\?\ strip), NEVER os.path.realpath — resolving symlinks collapses a relocated/symlinked worktree to its target and destroys the identity the guard keys on; sweep any path-normalization change with a regression test before landing. (session c32fdd41, 2026-06-17: realpath adopted to close \\?\/8.3 aliases, reverted — it broke symlinked-worktree identity and didn't even strip \\?\; lexical was right.) Any RE-EDIT of an enforcement guard made to address an auditor BLOCK must itself be re-audited before push — the corrected-direction fix routinely opens a DIFFERENT hole. (session 86f913c0, 2026-06-17: a fd-dup relaxation >{1,2}(?!&) over-excluded >&FILE, leaving a real write into protected bin/; the round-2 auditor caught it empirically and >{1,2}(?!&[0-9-]) was the verified fix.) When a NEW guard's detection (path-in-repo scoping, the mutating-verb set, the deny-decision shape) OVERLAPS an existing hardened guard, REUSE or mirror that guard's logic — never re-derive it. Re-derivation silently reproduces bugs the hardened guard already fixed AND documents: a whitespace token-split of a Bash command fails OPEN on a repo path containing a space ("GitHub Projects"), because root in token never matches the split fragment — scan the WHOLE command for the basename/prefix instead (guard_enforcement_layer.py). If a shared util is not yet extracted, make the divergence deliberate + documented and file the refactor. (session 21078e9b, 2026-06-23: a staged anti-scratchpad guard re-rolled a token-split and reproduced the spaced-path fail-open on this very repo, and missed writers the hardened set already covers — sed -i / truncate / ln / python open(...,'w'); only the harness-auditor caught it.)
• User-model entries: claims about THIS user's behavior only, with evidence counts. Decay rules live in commands/gc.md.
• Multi-stage skill SUITES (a gated pipeline of skills/phases — e.g. product strategy → product README): give the suite ONE canonical funnel view — the ordered stages plus the gate between each — not only a router that says "pick the smallest entry point." A pure-router front door trains reactive, one-stage-at-a-time use; the funnel shows the whole path so a session entering mid-pipeline still sees what precedes and follows. (followup 337ac0; retro-backlog 2026-06-19, session d7de6b55.)

Editing tracked files on this Windows checkout (core.autocrlf=true)

Working tree is CRLF, committed blobs are LF. The Edit tool matches an LF old_string against a CRLF working-tree file fine — do NOT pre-emptively normalize CRLF→LF, since a whole-file EOL flip pollutes the diff (the opposite of the goal). Only if an exact-match Edit UNEXPECTEDLY fails to match, fall back to reading the committed view (git show HEAD:<path>) or normalizing. A file showing "modified" may be a pure EOL artifact: confirm real change with git diff --ignore-cr-at-eol before calling the tree dirty (git restore is then content-neutral). Stage only intended files (git add -- <paths>, never -A) so a gitignored marker/state file can't ride into an enforcement-layer commit. (session cca5ccb9, 2026-06-14: a subagent normalized two guard files CRLF→LF before editing; a "modified" .claude/settings.json was a pure EOL artifact. session f36989d6, 2026-06-21: 8 exact-match Edits matched LF old_strings against CRLF cartograph/extract.py with no normalization — pre-emptive-normalize advice was overcautious and contradicted the no-EOL-flip rule in the same paragraph.)

The same autocrlf gotcha bites TESTS, not just edits: any test or --check that compares a COMMITTED text file against freshly GENERATED content passes on the authoring machine yet FALSE-FAILS on a clean checkout / CI — the committed-LF file is checked out CRLF while a generator emits LF. Normalize EOL on BOTH sides before comparing (s.replace(/\r\n/g,"\n")); a drift gate must catch CONTENT drift, not line-ending churn. Prove it by feeding the comparator a CRLF copy. (session 1a5cff26, 2026-06-22: a generated-docs drift test — committed .md == generator output — would have false-failed on every fresh clone until the comparison was EOL-normalized.)

Running scripts on this Windows checkout (cp1252 default + multiple drives)

Python here defaults to cp1252, not UTF-8. Any script that reads/writes files containing characters outside cp1252 (arrows like →, box-drawing, many smart-quote forms — common in harness output) MUST force UTF-8: open(p, encoding="utf-8"), and PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 for stdout. A cp1252 crash mid-write can leave the file TRUNCATED TO EMPTY (it wrote None) — so after any encoding crash, re-verify the file's contents before trusting it; never assume a partial write left it intact. Separately, os.path.relpath(path, start) raises ValueError when the two are on DIFFERENT drive letters (temp on C: while the repo is on D:) — guard it with try/except falling back to the absolute path, or normalize to the repo drive first. (session dc1c3470, 2026-06-19: cp1252 repeatedly crashed the cartograph extractor on non-cp1252 glyphs like arrows and once truncated cartograph/extract.py to empty; its new eval also caught a cross-drive relpath ValueError when --json wrote to C: from the D: repo.)

A CLI that ECHOES user-supplied data to stdout (a summary, tag, or note the user typed) cannot guarantee ASCII output even when its OWN framing strings are pure ASCII -- so set BOTH stdout and stderr to UTF-8 with errors=replace at the top of main() (for s in (sys.stdout, sys.stderr): s.reconfigure(encoding="utf-8", errors="replace")), or a stored non-cp1252 char (CJK, emoji) raises UnicodeEncodeError mid-print on a strict cp1252 console. ASCII framing of your own text is NOT enough once you echo arbitrary input. (session 04fb5c5c, 2026-06-21: auto-healer's heal.py had pure-ASCII framing yet crashed review on a CJK summary under PYTHONIOENCODING=cp1252; the harness-auditor reproduced it, and stdout/stderr errors=replace fixed it.)

Creating or moving hooks on this Windows checkout (git drops the +x bit)

core.fileMode is effectively off here, so git does not track the executable bit: a hook authored via Write or moved with git mv lands at mode 100644, and lint's H1 SKIPS the exec check on Windows — local lint passes clean while Linux CI's H1 FAILS ("not executable"). After creating/moving any hook (or an evals/corpus check.py), set it before committing: git update-index --chmod=+x hooks/<file> (verify git ls-files -s → 100755). Same trap on a test RELOCATION: a test_*.py moved from proposals/ (CI-excluded) into tests/ must be wired into .github/workflows/ci.yml or test_ci_coverage.py fails — run the FULL suite locally before pushing. (session 59d5001b, 2026-06-24: the Mission Control bundle moved 2 hooks + 3 tests; both the dropped +x and the unwired tests passed Windows lint but cost two Linux-CI round-trips before green.)