harness-engineering

An agent skill for setting up and improving harness engineering — the infrastructure that makes AI agents work effectively on your codebase.

Harness = the operating system for AI agents. Model is CPU, context window is RAM, harness is OS.

Install

# English version
npx skills add 10xChengTu/harness-engineering/skills/harness-engineering

# 中文版
npx skills add 10xChengTu/harness-engineering/skills/harness-engineering-zh

What It Does

This skill teaches your AI agent how to build and maintain the harness layer for any project — the AGENTS.md, docs/, lint rules, constraints, and evaluation systems that determine whether agents produce good or bad output.

Core principle: Start simple, add complexity only when needed. Every harness component encodes an assumption about what the model can't do alone.

Trigger Scenarios

You say...	The skill does...
"Set up this project for AI agents"	Full project harness setup
"Create an AGENTS.md"	Scaffolds entry point + docs structure
"The agent keeps ignoring conventions"	Diagnoses harness gaps, not model problems
"Why does it keep doing X wrong?"	Identifies root cause in harness layer
"Make agents work better on this codebase"	Assesses & incrementally improves harness

What's Covered

The skill includes 7 reference modules that the agent consults as needed:

Module	What It Covers
Project Setup	AGENTS.md structure, docs/ directory, design notes, init scripts
Context Engineering	What agents see, progressive disclosure, working state management
Constraints & Guardrails	Linters, type systems, architecture enforcement, safe autonomy
Multi-Agent Architecture	Agent separation, coordination protocols, delegation patterns
Eval & Feedback	Testing agent output, grading, observability, feedback loops
Long-Running Tasks	Progress tracking, context resets, handoff artifacts
Diagnosis	When agents underperform — symptom → root cause mapping

Bilingual Skills / 双语 Skill

This project provides two installable skills with identical content in different languages:

# English
npx skills add 10xChengTu/harness-engineering/skills/harness-engineering

# 中文
npx skills add 10xChengTu/harness-engineering/skills/harness-engineering-zh

Why This Exists

Poor agent output is almost always a harness problem, not a model problem. When your agent ignores conventions, makes wrong assumptions, or produces inconsistent results — the fix is better context, constraints, and feedback loops, not a bigger model.

This skill encodes the patterns and anti-patterns learned from real-world agent deployments so you don't have to rediscover them.

Compatibility

Works with any agent that supports the Agent Skills specification, including Claude Code, OpenCode, Cursor, Codex, Cline, GitHub Copilot, and 40+ more.