Harness Protocol

What problem does it solve?

This Skill provides the decision-making framework for autonomous engineering work, guiding the AI on when to proceed, revert, skip, or stop during unsupervised plan-work-review-commit cycles.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Gate Protocol: Defines hard and soft gates for checkpoints, specifying criteria and actions on failure or warning.
• Issue Parsing: Handles both well-structured and free-form issues, extracting goals, subsystems, acceptance criteria, constraints, and completion steps.
• Commit Discipline: Enforces one commit per change group and structured commit messages.
• Failure Taxonomy: Categorizes failures into retryable, structural, and blocked, with defined actions for each.
• Context Management: Provides strategies for pausing and resuming work to manage context budget.
• Self-Improvement: Triggers for logging friction patterns and handling spec gaps.
• Linear Etiquette: Guidelines for commenting, label conventions, and status transitions.

Quick Start

Use the harness protocol skill when running the autonomous engineering harness to guide decision-making.