harness-operator

name	harness-operator
description	Operate the vh-agent-harness agent harness itself — install, self-update, run the upgrade loop, read release migration notes, and use guide/update/doctor. Load this skill when asked to install, update, or operate the harness, or to read what changed in a release.
compatibility	opencode

Harness Operator

This skill is the load trigger for operating the harness itself. It is a concise routing aid, not a duplicate of the long-form manual. vh-agent-harness guide is the dynamic authority — it reflects the real command surface of the binary you are running; this skill points at it.

For extending the harness (adding agents/commands/skills/overlays), use /harness instead — that is a different concern. Route there, do not duplicate.

When to load

Load this skill when the task is any of:

• installing or re-installing the harness into a repo (vh-agent-harness install),
• running a release upgrade (self-update → update loop),
• previewing or applying a corpus refresh (update --dry-run / update),
• reading what changed in a release and how to migrate (help migrate),
• health-checking the install (doctor), or
• deciding what to edit when a generated file is wrong.

The core loop

guide  →  update  →  doctor

• vh-agent-harness guide — orient yourself; state-aware next steps for the current directory. Run this first when unsure.
• vh-agent-harness update --dry-run — ownership-safe preview; nothing is written. Always preview before applying.
• vh-agent-harness update — apply platform_managed + active overlay_extension.
• vh-agent-harness doctor — lint the result; resolve any findings before considering the install healthy.

Golden rules

1. Preview first. Run update --dry-run before update. The dry run is side-effect-free (no write, no lineage touch).
2. Never hand-edit platform_managed files. They are overwritten on every update. A change you need there must come from the template source.
3. Edit under .vh-agent-harness/, never .opencode/. The .opencode/ tree is GENERATED from .vh-agent-harness/ plus the embedded corpus; any hand edit there vanishes on the next update.
4. Respect ownership. A plain render only overwrites platform_managed (and active overlay_extension). project_owned files are preserved when present and seeded at most once when absent.

The release upgrade loop

After a self-update, run this exact sequence (it is also the canonical sequence embedded in every migration note):

vh-agent-harness self-update            # pull the new binary
vh-agent-harness version                # confirm the new version
vh-agent-harness update --dry-run       # ownership-safe preview of the refresh
vh-agent-harness update                 # apply platform_managed + active overlay_extension
vh-agent-harness doctor                 # lint the result

Editing templates/core/ in the working tree? Run make update, not a bare vh-agent-harness update. update renders from the binary's embedded copy, which may be older than your working-tree edits and will silently overwrite newer .opencode/ renders — doctor cannot detect the revert (it re-renders from the same stale corpus and byte-compares). The Makefile target rebuilds first, so the embedded corpus matches the tree before re-rendering. Consumer repos that only run a shipped binary are unaffected.

This guard is now ENFORCED, not just documented: in a source checkout (a target carrying both corpus.go and templates/core/), a LIVE vh-agent-harness update REFUSES when the binary's embedded corpus DIFFERS from the checkout's templates/core/, with make update (rebuild first) as the recovery and --allow-stale-corpus as the explicit override. update --dry-run still previews but warns that the output reflects the BINARY's corpus, not a rebuilt one. doctor surfaces a non-failing dev-stale-embed WARN and qualifies its managed-drift line (it says "in sync with the embedded corpus in this binary", never a bare "in sync"). A target without both corpus.go and templates/core/ (every consumer) is completely unaffected — the guard never fires there.

Reading migration notes

Every release ships a migration note so operators and agents know what changed and how to migrate:

• vh-agent-harness help migrate — print the bounded forward path: every bundled note whose target falls in the half-open interval (adopted, binary], oldest first (adopted = the locally installed version detected from lineage, binary = the running binary). Releases in the interval that have no consumer-visible note are skipped silently; a non-released binary (e.g. a -dev/+meta build) is honestly reported as "cannot infer a released range" rather than guessed.
• vh-agent-harness help migrate v0.1.9 — show a specific release's note verbatim (a bare 0.1.9 is normalized to v0.1.9). This is documentation only — it does not inspect your adopted version or compute an upgrade path.

Notes describe consumer-visible changes, the automated migration sequence, watch-outs, verification commands, and rollback. Read the note for the version you are upgrading to before running the loop above.

Profile and capabilities (the agent roster)

vh-agent-harness guide reports the live roster; the roster itself is selected in .vh-agent-harness/vh-harness-profile.yml via three cooperating fields:

• profile: — the preset enum. minimal/coordination/web → the 8-agent baseline only; supervised → baseline + the gated-commit and debate clusters. An unknown value falls back to baseline-only (the safe default).
• capabilities: — an explicit opt-in list of capability IDs (e.g. core/release) that unions onto the preset (adds, never replaces). The shipped release pack is selected this way; selecting core/release also pulls the gated-commit cluster via hard-dep closure.
• modules: — deprecated. A non-empty modules: emits a one-line warning on every update/doctor nudging migration to profile: + capabilities:. It still parses (existing profiles keep working) but carries no effect.

Edit the profile, then vh-agent-harness update to re-render. The two selection paths for an overlay pack converge: capabilities: [core/release] and overlays: [release] render the same cluster. vh-agent-harness guide is the authority for the live state.

Pointers

• vh-agent-harness guide — dynamic, state-aware operating manual (authority).
• README.agent.md — long-form operating reference rendered into the repo.
• /harness — recipe for extending the harness (agents/commands/skills/overlays).