| name | propose-harness-improvement |
| description | Use this skill whenever the agent makes a mistake, the user observes an avoidable failure, a pattern recurs, or someone says "the agent keeps doing X". Files an "Engineer the Harness" entry — Mitchell Hashimoto's discipline: every failure becomes a permanent prevention mechanism. Always invoke this instead of just fixing the immediate symptom. |
Steps
- Triage. Ask: "What just went wrong? What was the agent's intended
behavior? What's the symptom?"
- Gather deterministic signals. Run the runtime-agnostic bundle when local
telemetry/bypass logs exist:
node .harness/scripts/improvement-bundle.mjs.
Use its taxonomy_classification,
suggested_records, and nextSteps as evidence, not as a substitute for
judgment.
- Classify. Read
.harness/failures/taxonomy.json and pick exactly one
primary class: context-miss, false-done, architecture-drift,
test-gap, doc-drift, tool-misuse, permission-gap, runtime-gap,
eval-gap, cost-spike, or model-behavior.
- Write a failure record with
.harness/scripts/record-failure.mjs.
Include evidence paths, prevention target, proposed prevention, and
verification command when the prevention is already applied or verified.
If the prevention target differs from the taxonomy class
preferredPrevention, include a concrete prevention justification.
Hand-write JSON only if the helper is unavailable.
To promote an existing record after applying the prevention, use
.harness/scripts/record-failure.mjs --update=<id> --status=applied|verified
so the helper preserves the original failure fields and reruns the checker.
- Append a human summary to
.harness/docs/agent-failures.md with: date,
symptom, failure class, prevention target, file modified.
- Apply the fix in the right place. NEVER paper over with a CLAUDE.md
"be careful" sentence unless rule (a) applies — and even then, only as a
pointer to a longer doc.
- Update PROGRESS. Append
harness-improvement: <slug> to
.harness/PROGRESS.md.
Output contract
### Failure: <one-line summary>
### Classification: <taxonomy class>
### Prevention target: <target>
### Fix applied at: <file:line>
### Failure record: .harness/failures/records/<id>.json
### .harness/docs/agent-failures.md entry: §<n>
Anti-patterns (block on these)
- Don't add a vague "be careful with X" sentence to CLAUDE.md.
- Don't add a rule whose enforcement is also LLM-based.
- Don't use this skill to log unrelated cleanup ideas — those go in
.harness/docs/tech-debt-tracker.md.
