Documentation
Overview
harness-miniis a minimal, CLI-agnostic agent harness: convention + skills + sub-agents + distilled best-practice docs, with only thin shell glue as code. It encodes the patterns from Anthropic's long-running-agent engineering, OpenAI's harness engineering, and Anthropic's Founder's Playbook into a structure you can drop into any project.
The harness is the environment, not a program. Any agent that can run a shell — claude, codex, cursor — can use it. The repository is the system of record: anything not in a version-controlled file does not exist to the agent.
$ git clone https://github.com/harness-mini/harness-mini.git$ bash harness-mini/init.sh /path/to/your/projectThe 40% line
The smart/dumb contract — the intellectual core. How every agent keeps its context in the smart zone.
Principles & core-mind
Musk's Five-Step Algorithm, the golden principles, and the clean-code / refactor quality spine.
Architecture
Repository layout, the lifecycle FSM, the horizontal+vertical coding contract, and new-vs-existing install.
References distilled in the harness
- Anthropic — Effective harnesses for long-running agents
- Anthropic — Harness design for long-running apps
- OpenAI — Harness engineering (leveraging Codex)
- Anthropic — The Founder's Playbook