The four layers that produce this configuration — the machine's global file, the project's, the team's and this machine's overlay — are described in ADR-0033. ak-harness loop validate prints the effective result, which is the only one that decides anything.

211 of 366 paths carry no description yet.

schemaVersion

Type: number · Default: 1

extends

Defaults for this kind of project (web-app, library, monorepo, data-pipeline, mobile), merged below every other layer. Anything this file states wins over the preset; the preset only fills silence.

Type: string

project

orca

linear

knownFailures

Suites already red on the base branch, declared so a worker is not asked to pass a verification that nobody can pass. The harness does NOT run delivery.verifyCommand — the worker does, in its own worktree, before opening the PR. So tolerating known breakage cannot be done by parsing output the harness never sees: it has to be told to the worker, which is what this list does. Every entry carries the tracking issue on purpose. A quarantine without an owner becomes permanent, and the worker needs to know the failure is someone else's to avoid "fixing" it inside an unrelated task.

reviewOverrides

Stricter review for the slices of the board that deserve it, keyed by label. The review IS the gate when there is no CI, and not every change carries the same risk: a contract that freezes evidence and a copy tweak should not be judged with the same budget. First matching entry wins, and it only overrides the fields it names — everything else falls back to delivery.review.

models

machine

delivery

contract

memory

agents

rag

mcp

plugins

github

resilience

brief

security

budget

Ceilings on what the loop may spend. A budget that is reached escalates; it never insists — the loop calling the same model again with less headroom is how a bad hour becomes a bad week.

intake

Where work comes from when nobody typed it: an alert, a log error, a piece of user feedback. intake reads the declared sources, deduplicates against what it already filed, and creates the issue with its evidence. It is what closes the cycle — and the only way the incident flow starts without a human at a keyboard.

maintain

Dependencies, security and licences, on a schedule — what a bot does from outside, inside the loop and under the same Definition of Done. A check that has nothing to decide files nothing.

connectors

Which implementation of each connector this project uses. The engine speaks only to the interfaces (TrackerConnector, ScmConnector, RunnerConnector); adding Jira, GitLab or a cloud sandbox is a new implementation and a new value here, never a change in tick, deliver or release.

release

Promotion and deploy. The loop closes an issue when it merges into project.baseBranch — the integration branch; release moves that batch to releaseBranch and runs the project's deploy, and it never starts without a human approving the batch. Everything that acts on the world keeps a human in front of it.

worker

The roles that run per issue, and the plan the worker starts from. The planner and the vote run in the harness, headless, before dispatch — the same shape as freezing the contract. The model writes the plan and writes the votes; the machine counts them and decides. The worker is only launched once a plan has consensus, so it starts from an approved plan instead of inventing one.

layers

The slices of the codebase, each with the one thing that decides it: a label the tracker carries, a file boundary, and the test that closes it. This is the source; a layer's description in the tracker is a reflection of it, never the other way round. The decomposer reads these to place an issue, the brief tells the worker which test closes its layer, and the cheap verifier runs that test instead of the whole suite when the issue belongs to one.

documents

Where the PRD, the technical design and the decisions live once a human approves them. file writes them into the repository, which is what makes them reviewable, diffable and greppable by the workers that come later. none keeps them only in the loop's state. A tracker-document backend is the seam this leaves open; Orca's CLI has no document command today, so there is nothing honest to implement against.

dod

The project's half of the Definition of Done: the same list for every issue, and every item provable. The issue's half is the frozen contract's outcomes. A PR merges only when both lists are proven, and the proof — a command's output, a changed file, an absent pattern — is written on the PR. There is deliberately no manual kind: what cannot be proven is not a DoD item, it is a wish.

tuning

Knobs the retro is allowed to move by itself, each inside a declared range and justified by a declared metric. A knob with no metric is not auto-adjustable: the metric is what proves the change helped, and it is the same number that reverts it when the next cycle is worse. Never auto-adjustable, whatever this block says: models, providers, gates and branches — the things that decide who pays and what reaches production.

flows

Named flow profiles — one motor, several kinds of demand. A profile switches on and off what the loop spends: review strictness and votes, CI babysitting, the human gates, and (as the stages land) the worker's own roles. A selection rule picks one per issue; unmatched issues get flows.default.

notifications

Where the loop calls a human. The tracker comment always happens — it is the record; this is the channel on top of it. Two generic shapes only: a webhook (Slack, Discord, Telegram bots, n8n) and a local command (system notification, mail CLI). Zero vendor code, so a new destination is configuration, not a release.

schedule