Harness Engineering Playbook

A skills.sh-compatible skill that operationalizes the practices from OpenAI's Harness Engineering guide. Use it to set up or refactor agent-first workflows so that autonomous runs are repeatable, observable, and safe.

Install

npx skills add broomva/harness-engineering-skill --skill harness-engineering-playbook

What It Does

• Bootstraps harness artifacts: AGENTS.md, PLANS.md, docs/ARCHITECTURE.md, docs/OBSERVABILITY.md, Makefile.harness, and CI workflows.
• Wraps deterministic commands behind make smoke, make check, make ci so agents can run them reliably.
• Enforces strict module boundaries and data-shape contracts.
• Wires structured observability (correlation IDs, key transitions) from day 1.
• Adds entropy-control audits and nightly harness checks to prevent docs drift and flaky scripts.

Workflow

1. Baseline the target repo — detect language, toolchain, and existing CI.
2. Bootstrap harness artifacts from templates (interactive wizard or shell script).
3. Apply the nine Harness Engineering practices across repo artifacts.
4. Validate with audit — treat any MISSING or FAIL as blocking.
5. Iterate after real agent runs — patch gaps and re-audit.

Quick Start

# Interactive wizard (recommended)
python3 .agents/skills/harness-engineering-playbook/scripts/harness_wizard.py init <repo-path> --profile control

# Shell fallback
./scripts/bootstrap_harness.sh <repo-path>

# Audit
python3 .agents/skills/harness-engineering-playbook/scripts/harness_wizard.py audit <repo-path>

Profiles

Source

OpenAI Harness Engineering guide: https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

License

MIT