Harness skill creator
Skill QoderAI/better-harness/.agents/skills/harness-skill-creator
Use when bootstrapping or tightening the smallest harness-oriented skill from an existing repository, workflow, evaluation corpus, or harness-analysis chain. Trigger for meta skills, reusable harness workflows, Qoder/Codex plugin skill sets, skill blueprints, and harness-analysis-like skills that need evidence-backed references, validation gates, and qodercli forward-tests.From its SKILL.md
npx -y skills add QoderAI/better-harness --skill harness-skill-creatorAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
SKILL.md
3.3 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Harness Skill Creator
Create the smallest skill that makes another agent repeat one harness job with evidence, validation, and clear ownership.
Workflow
- Resolve source, target, and host: canonical
skills/<name>/,.agents/skills/wrapper, or both. - Inspect the source chain before designing: entry
SKILL.md, first-hop references, scripts, validators, templates, specs, tests, plugin manifests, and any real smoke evidence. - Load
references/bootstrap-patterns.mdafter the first inventory. Use it to extract patterns, not product-specific rules. - Draft the minimum viable skill map:
- skill name and trigger sentence
- one job the skill owns
- files to create under
skills/<skill-name>/, usuallySKILL.mdplus one reference - evidence boundary and validation commands
- forward-test prompt and pass/fail gates
- Initialize new canonical skills with the system
skill-creatorhelper when available. Addscripts/only for stable repeated automation; keep ad-hoc evaluation prompts out of runtime scripts. - Write the
SKILL.mdas a router. Put trigger conditions in frontmatterdescription, keep the body short, and route detailed rules to first-hop references. - Validate locally, then forward-test. Treat qodercli output as model evidence; local validators and file inspection decide pass/fail.
Design Gates
- Prefer one skill over a stage tree until the target process proves multiple reusable stages.
- Copy ownership shape, not product names, branch policy, private commands, or source-specific team routing.
- Keep
.agents/skills/as a wrapper or mirror when the workflow is shared by the plugin; canonical judgment belongs under rootskills/. - Do not add install, network, server, migration, or dependency-changing commands unless the user requested them and source evidence supports them.
- Prefer portable Node/Python validators or target-owned commands. Do not default generated validation gates to Unix-only
grep/findchecks. - In attachment-only or no-tools forward-tests, never emit tool-call markup, shell probes, or inspection plans; return the skill map with
status: "insufficient-evidence"when needed. - Forward-test
filesis a string array ofskills/<skill-name>/...paths, not objects. - If the generated skill cannot pass
quick_validate.py <skill-dir>, do not describe it as usable. - After any forward-test, verify git status or file inventory for every repo the model was allowed to read or write.
Validation
Run the narrowest useful gates for the created skill:
python3 <skill-creator-root>/scripts/quick_validate.py <skill-dir>
qodercli --cwd <neutral-dir> --plugin-dir <harness-root> -p "<forward-test prompt>"
qodercli plugin validate <harness-root>
Reject missing frontmatter, stale placeholders, broken links, unsupported commands, source-only assumptions, pseudo tool calls, or broad reports.