Introduction

Better Harness provides open-source insights for the Agent Work Loop. It turns project and session evidence into prioritized improvements and verifiable next steps inside the coding agent you already use.

Why Better Harness?

AI coding agents change code fast, but the workflow around them is often the weak point:

• 🎯 Fuzzy goals — the agent confidently solves the wrong problem.
• 🧭 Improvised steps — work happens on paths nobody can reproduce.
• ✅ "It works" without proof — validation is incomplete or missing.
• 🚢 Speed over safeguards — review and delivery checks get bypassed.
• 🧠 Lessons lost — the same friction comes back on the next task.

Reviewing only the final diff misses these system-level problems. Better Harness analyzes the workflow around the diff: it gathers project evidence (and session evidence where supported), evaluates five connected dimensions, and turns concrete gaps into prioritized findings — each tied to its evidence, expected outcome, repair boundary, and validation route, so a team can improve one issue at a time.

What is open

Better Harness opens three connected layers, not only a slash-command prompt:

• Engineering practices — evidence and judgment guidance across Session Evidence, Project Harness, Agent Customize, and Loop Engineering.
• Evaluation model — the task-centered Agent Work Loop, including evidence states, findings, scoring boundaries, and longitudinal validation.
• Runnable implementation — the canonical /better-harness workflow, evidence collectors, analyzers, renderers, and thin host adapters.

The three layers share the same boundary: configured assets can establish that a mechanism exists, but only linked task evidence can establish that it was used or improved an outcome.

Deliberately honest

Unobserved behavior stays explicit instead of becoming an unsupported score or claim. Passing a current check proves that the intervention was exercised; only a comparable later result can prove that the loop improved.

Next steps

• Check the prerequisites, then install Better Harness for your coding agent.
• Generate your first report.
• Understand the Agent Work Loop behind every report.

Source of truth

This site is a curated view. Canonical judgment lives in the repository under skills/, models/, references/, and docs/.