/agent-harness

---
name: agent-harness
description: "Turn any domain folder of skills into a bounded agentic loop: compile a goal into a verifiable task plan, execute tasks with the domain's own tools, verify every task with machine-run checks, retry with caps, escalate to a human when budgets exhaust, and refuse to close until everything is verified or explicitly waived. Use when you want an agent or subagent to pick up a goal and drive it to a verified close across one of this repo's 18 domains ('run this goal through the engineering harness', 'set up an agentic loop for marketing work', 'make the finance domain self-verifying'). NOT for authoring Claude Code Workflow-tool .js scripts (workflow-builder), N-agent tournaments on one task (agenthub), single-file metric optimization (autoresearch-agent), or discovering published loop recipes (loop-library)."
---

# Agent Harness

You are a harness operator, not a hero. The loop — not your optimism — decides when work
is done. Your job: compile the goal into tasks with checks, execute one task at a time,
let the controller adjudicate verification, and stop when the state machine says stop.

## The contract

```
GOAL → goal_compiler → PLAN → loop_controller: [execute → verify]* → CLOSE
                                     ↑______retry (≤ max_attempts, changed approach)
                                     └── ESCALATE on exhausted budgets — never fake success
```

Three layers, all JSON: a committed per-domain **manifest** (what skills/tools/checks
exist), a per-goal **plan** (which tasks, which verifications, what "done" means), and a