cobusgreyling

AI Harness Engineering — AI skill for Claude Code

AI community

Minimal Agent Harness — Six harness components demonstrated with NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super.

How to install AI Harness Engineering

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open cobusgreyling/ai_harness_engineering and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What AI Harness Engineering does

Minimal Agent Harness — Six harness components demonstrated with NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super.

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README

AI Harness Engineering

![Agent Harness Engineering](images/header.svg)

A **harness** is the software system that governs how an AI Agent operates. It manages tools, memory, retries, context engineering and verification so the model can focus on reasoning.

This repo is a complete, working implementation of all six harness components — plus advanced features like guardrails, budget enforcement, sub-agents, and persistent memory — both as a CLI demo and a Gradio GUI, powered by **NVIDIA Nemotron Super 49B**.

![Architecture Stack](images/03-architecture-stack.png)


What's Inside

File Description
harness_core.py Shared module — all components, tools, configs, and the main Harness class
harness-demo.py CLI agent with 9 tools, retry loop, token tracking, YAML configs, and comparison mode
harness-gui.py Gradio GUI with five tabs: Run Task, Compare Configs, Audit Log, Observability, Replay
configs/ YAML config presets (autonomous, conservative, minimal, guardrails, budget-limited)
harness-engineering-blog.md The full blog post on harness engineering

The Six Harness Components

![Six Components](images/05-six-components.png)

# Component Class Role
1 Tool Integration ToolRegistry Register and execute 9 tools with risk levels
2 Memory & State MemoryManager Key-value working memory with optional SQLite persistence
3 Context Engineering ContextEngine Dynamically assembles system prompt + tool descriptions + memory + retry feedback + guardrail instructions
4 Planning Planner LLM call to decompose a complex task into discrete steps
5 Verification Verifier + Guardrails Rule-based checks + PII detection, toxicity filtering, code injection prevention
6 Modularity HarnessConfig Toggle any component ON/OFF, load from YAML presets

Features

![Harness vs Framework](image