Engineering

Harness engineering

A reference corpus, not a dependency. It holds a thesis and playbooks for improving agent output by shaping the environment around a fixed model and agent — not code a project imports or vendors. Ryan Lopopolo's work, bundled here under CC BY 4.0; see COPYING.md and LICENSE.

When to reach for it

1. Only on a genuinely unresolved decision. Read the target repo's own instructions, domain model, and precedent first. Consult this corpus for the specific concern local evidence leaves open. Don't preload it for routine work.
2. Target-local truth always wins. The corpus can sharpen a decision; it never overrides the target repo's contracts, authority, or conventions. Adapt the applicable idea — don't copy its file layout, policies, or fixtures.
3. Treat it as read-only. It is reference material, not a working tree.

Working loop

1. Read the target's available instructions and architecture first. For a repository, begin with its agent guide.
2. Inspect the target's actual domain model, manifests, tools, tests, permissions, operating history, and neighboring implementations. Find the local owner or precedent for the concern before retrieving general guidance.
3. Name the governing decision that local evidence leaves unresolved. Stop here when none remains. Otherwise pick one primary route below and read that thesis README.md. Add a second route only for a genuinely distinct concern.

Context routing

Route an unresolved decision to one thesis section under reference/docs/:

Application routing

For applying the practice rather than deciding a point of design, read reference/playbooks/README.md before selecting a procedure:

• Improve the harness around one observed job — improve-harness.md, read after the target's instructions and before collecting a baseline or making a change. Use the thesis routing above inside its gap-classification step.
• Assess a repository broadly — repository-review.md, read before beginning the review.
• Make a comparative, causal, or longitudinal claim — reference/evals/README.md, read before running conditions.

To learn or teach the practice as a whole, start at reference/README.md and the thesis index in reference/docs/README.md.

Provenance

reference/sources/ holds the raw source material the prose draws on. Consult it to check a claim against its origin; it is provenance, not guidance. The CC BY 4.0 grant excludes third-party quotations, images, screenshots, embeds, logos, and trademarks identified in the sources — those remain with their rightsholders.