| name | agent-harness-construction |
| description | Design and optimize AI agent action spaces, tool definitions, and observation formatting for higher completion rates. Use when defining or revising an agent's tool set, action space, or observation format. |
| metadata | {"origin":"ECC"} |
Agent Harness Construction
Use this skill when you are improving how an agent plans, calls tools, recovers from errors, and converges on completion.
Core Model
Agent output quality is constrained by:
- Action space quality
- Observation quality
- Recovery quality
- Context budget quality
Action Space Design
- Use stable, explicit tool names.
- Keep inputs schema-first and narrow.
- Return deterministic output shapes.
- Avoid catch-all tools unless isolation is impossible.
Granularity Rules
- Use micro-tools for high-risk operations (deploy, migration, permissions).
- Use medium tools for common edit/read/search loops.
- Use macro-tools only when round-trip overhead is the dominant cost.
Observation Design
Every tool response should include:
status: success|warning|errorsummary: one-line resultnext_actions: actionable follow-upsartifacts: file paths / IDs
Error Recovery Contract
For every error path, include:
- root cause hint
- safe retry instruction
- explicit stop condition
Context Budgeting
- Keep system prompt minimal and invariant.
- Move large guidance into skills loaded on demand.
- Prefer references to files over inlining long documents.
- Compact at phase boundaries, not arbitrary token thresholds.
Architecture Pattern Guidance
- ReAct: best for exploratory tasks with uncertain path.
- Function-calling: best for structured deterministic flows.
- Hybrid (recommended): ReAct planning + typed tool execution.
Benchmarking
Track:
- completion rate
- retries per task
- pass@1 and pass@3
- cost per successful task
Anti-Patterns
- Too many tools with overlapping semantics.
- Opaque tool output with no recovery hints.
- Error-only output without next steps.
- Context overloading with irrelevant references.
