@agentskit/harness runs one project's software development lifecycle unattended: a vague objective becomes a PRD, the PRD becomes a design and issues, each issue becomes a contract, a worker in its own worktree, a reviewed pull request proven against a definition of done, a merge — and, behind a human gate, a release.

It is a CLI and a library. There is no daemon, no dashboard and no database: the state is files in .ak-loop/ next to your repository, and the schedule is whatever your machine already uses.

It is free and open source under the MIT licence.

1. plan

   objective → PRD → design → issues

   two human gates

2. tick

   queue → contract → plan → dispatch

3. deliver

   PR → checks → review → DoD → merge

4. observe

   anomalies, metrics, a scheduler exit code

5. release

   promote → deploy → smoke → rollback

   human approval, bound to a sha

6. intake · maintain

   alerts and checks become issues

What the harness decides, and what it does not

The harness orchestrates: what to dispatch, who runs each role, when to nudge, hand off or escalate, what blocks a merge, and when a batch may be promoted.

It does not drive the worker's own model and tool loop. Each worker is an opaque CLI session — claude, codex, grok, opencode — in its own worktree. The harness hands it a brief and reads what it leaves behind: three files in .ak-loop/ that say what it planned, what it ran, and what it proved. The loop advances on files it can check, never on what a terminal said.

Where to start

Requirements

Node.js 22 or newer, a git repository with a committed HEAD, at least one coding-agent CLI on PATH, and a tracker the loop can read a queue from. ak-harness loop doctor tells you which of those is missing before anything is dispatched.