| name | harness |
| description | Delegate a hard decision or conundrum to the Kyotee harness engine — a cross-vendor Council that debates to consensus, a Two-Brain divergent/ convergent debate, or a forced tool-checking solo run. Use when a decision is high-stakes, genuinely contested, or benefits from multiple model perspectives, and you want a synthesised answer (with dissent noted) back in this session. Requires a running kyotee engine (see setup). |
Harness Skill
When to use
- A design/architecture decision with real trade-offs and no obvious winner
→
--strategy council.
- A creative-but-constrained problem needing option generation then rigorous
pruning →
--strategy twobrain.
- A question hinging on current/present-state facts you must not answer from
memory →
--strategy solo --thinking slow (forces the tool-check pre-pass).
When NOT to use
- Routine coding you can do directly. This spins up external models and costs
money; reserve it for genuinely hard sub-decisions.
Limitation (read this)
Claude Code is already an agent loop. This skill does not turn this session
into a council — it delegates to the external Kyotee engine and brings the
synthesised result back. Think "consult a panel," not "become the panel."
Setup
- Ensure the engine is running (
kyotee serve) and KYOTEE_URL points at it
(default http://127.0.0.1:8484; HARNESS_URL is honoured too).
- Ensure provider API keys are configured in the engine's config
(
~/.kyotee/config.yaml; check with kyotee providers).
Usage
Run the CLI and capture the synthesised answer (progress streams to stderr;
stdout carries only the answer):
kyotee ask "Should we adopt event sourcing for the billing service?" \
--strategy council --consensus judge --budget 3.00 --wait
Then incorporate the printed answer (and any noted dissent) into your work.
For machine-readable output add --json, which emits a stable contract:
{
"task_id": "…",
"answer": "…",
"strategy": "council",
"consensus": { "reached": true, "method": "judge", "rounds_used": 2 },
"dissent": ["gemini-3-pro favored a simpler queue-based approach"],
"total_cost_usd": 1.87,
"total_tokens": 41230
}
dissent is populated when the council deadlocked with noted disagreement or
a judge flagged holdouts — surface it rather than presenting false confidence.
Other subcommands: kyotee resume <task_id> --wait, kyotee status <task_id>,
kyotee providers, kyotee config validate <file>.
The CLI exits non-zero on engine errors or when the budget was exhausted
before any answer was produced; without a running engine it fails fast with a
"start kyotee serve / check KYOTEE_URL" message.
