Introduction

Better Harness reviews how coding agents understand tasks, make changes, verify results, deliver safely, and learn—then shows what to improve next, with every finding tied to visible evidence.

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 reviews the workflow itself: 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

• 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/.