Harness Skill Creator

Harness Skill Creator

Create the smallest skill that makes another agent repeat one harness job with evidence, validation, and clear ownership.

Workflow

1. Resolve source, target, and host: canonical skills/<name>/, .agents/skills/ wrapper, or both.
2. Inspect the source chain before designing: entry SKILL.md, first-hop references, scripts, validators, templates, specs, tests, plugin manifests, and any real smoke evidence.
3. Load references/bootstrap-patterns.md after the first inventory. Use it to extract patterns, not product-specific rules.
4. Draft the minimum viable skill map:
   • skill name and trigger sentence
   • one job the skill owns
   • files to create under skills/<skill-name>/, usually SKILL.md plus one reference
   • evidence boundary and validation commands
   • forward-test prompt and pass/fail gates
5. Initialize new canonical skills with the system skill-creator helper when available. Add scripts/ only for stable repeated automation; keep ad-hoc evaluation prompts out of runtime scripts.
6. Write the SKILL.md as a router. Put trigger conditions in frontmatter description, keep the body short, and route detailed rules to first-hop references.
7. Validate locally, then forward-test. Treat qodercli output as model evidence; local validators and file inspection decide pass/fail.

Design Gates

• Prefer one skill over a stage tree until the target process proves multiple reusable stages.
• Copy ownership shape, not product names, branch policy, private commands, or source-specific team routing.
• Keep .agents/skills/ as a wrapper or mirror when the workflow is shared by the plugin; canonical judgment belongs under root skills/.
• Do not add install, network, server, migration, or dependency-changing commands unless the user requested them and source evidence supports them.
• Prefer portable Node/Python validators or target-owned commands. Do not default generated validation gates to Unix-only grep/find checks.
• In attachment-only or no-tools forward-tests, never emit tool-call markup, shell probes, or inspection plans; return the skill map with status: "insufficient-evidence" when needed.
• Forward-test files is a string array of skills/<skill-name>/... paths, not objects.
• If the generated skill cannot pass quick_validate.py <skill-dir>, do not describe it as usable.
• After any forward-test, verify git status or file inventory for every repo the model was allowed to read or write.

Validation

Run the narrowest useful gates for the created skill:

python3 <skill-creator-root>/scripts/quick_validate.py <skill-dir>
qodercli --cwd <neutral-dir> --plugin-dir <harness-root> -p "<forward-test prompt>"
qodercli plugin validate <harness-root>

Reject missing frontmatter, stale placeholders, broken links, unsupported commands, source-only assumptions, pseudo tool calls, or broad reports.