# AgentsKit Harness

> The keep-pushing loop for your SDLC: a vague objective interviewed into a PRD, issues contracted and
> dispatched into their own worktrees, reviewed, proven against a definition of done, merged, and released
> behind a human gate.

## Start here

- [Quickstart](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/get-started/quickstart/): from nothing to a first dispatched issue in four commands.
- [Stages](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/stages/): the state machines, and what each one decides.
- [For agents](https://harness.agentskit.io/for-agents/): what an agent needs to operate the loop without guessing.

## Documentation

- [Phase artifacts](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/artifacts/): Three files in the worktree. The loop advances on what it can check, never on what a terminal said.
- [Connectors](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/connectors/): Three seams — tracker, SCM, runner — and an honest account of which one is actually proven.
- [Contracts](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/contracts/): What is frozen before a worker starts, why it is frozen, and what a contract refuses to be.
- [Cost](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/cost/): The policy, the ceilings, the four levers — and what the harness cannot measure.
- [Definition of done](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/definition-of-done/): Two lists, both proven on the pull request, and no item whose proof is "someone looked at it".
- [Events and plugins](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/events/): Every decision the loop makes writes an event, and the vocabulary is enforced by the compiler.
- [Flows](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/flows/): One motor, several kinds of demand. A profile switches what the loop spends on an issue.
- [Human gates](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/human-gates/): Every point where the loop stops and waits for a person, and why it stops there and not elsewhere.
- [Layers](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/layers/): The slices of a codebase, each with the one command that closes it and the boundary it owns.
- [Memory](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/memory/): What the loop is allowed to remember, who approved it, and why the attribution matters more than the storage.
- [Plans and votes](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/plans-and-votes/): The planner proposes, agents vote, and the machine counts. Running out of cycles is not a retry.
- [Self-improvement](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/self-improvement/): The three things the loop may change about itself, each bounded, measured, attributed and off by default.
- [Stages](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/stages/): Six state machines. The model produces content; the machine decides the transition.
- [State machines](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/concepts/state-machines/): One diagram per stage — the states, the transitions, and who decides each one.
- [The four layers](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/configuration/layers/): Where each setting belongs, and why the project outweighs the global file.
- [Models and routing](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/configuration/models/): Tiers, failover, cooldowns and pins — how a role gets a model, and what happens when it cannot.
- [Presets](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/configuration/presets/): Five kinds of project, and why a preset leaves your config file short.
- [Scheduling](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/configuration/scheduling/): What runs when, why every stage exits 1, and how drift is found.
- [Your first loop in 10 minutes](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/examples/first-loop/): init, doctor, a dry-run tick and a first dispatch — with the real output of each step.
- [One issue, three flows](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/examples/one-issue-three-flows/): The same objective through enterprise, POC and incident — what changes, and what never does.
- [Plugging it in](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/examples/plugging-in/): An escalation webhook, the local runner, and the smallest tracker connector that is honest.
- [The day the loop escalated](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/examples/the-day-it-escalated/): Four ways the loop stops and asks — unverifiable, no consensus, out of rounds, paused — and what each looks like.
- [Your first issue](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/get-started/first-issue/): What to put in the first ticket you hand the loop, and how to read what comes back.
- [How it works](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/get-started/how-it-works/): One pass through the whole cycle, from an objective nobody has written down to a released change.
- [Installation](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/get-started/installation/): What the harness needs on the machine, and what it refuses to start without.
- [Quickstart](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/get-started/quickstart/): From nothing to a first dispatched issue in four commands, none of which touches anything before you say so.
- [Installed agents](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/guides/agents/): Mapping a role to an agent the project installed, and what the harness will and will not change about it.
- [Driving a plan](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/guides/driving-plan/): Turning a vague objective into issues, one question at a time, without answering for the human.
- [Intake and maintenance](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/guides/intake-and-maintain/): Alerts and recurring checks become tracked issues — deduplicated, with evidence, inside the same loop.
- [Running without Orca](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/guides/local-runner/): git worktree, tmux and the system crontab — the second implementation that keeps the runner seam honest.
- [Operating the loop](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/guides/operating/): The read-only commands, in the order an experienced operator reaches for them.
- [Writing a plugin](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/guides/plugins/): Subscribe to events, block a decision, and keep a broken plugin from taking down the loop.
- [Releasing](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/guides/release/): Promotion, deploy, smoke and rollback — for a batch a human approved, bound to a head sha.
- [Troubleshooting](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/guides/troubleshooting/): The failures people actually hit, what causes them, and what to do.
- [Harness](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/): The keep-pushing loop for your SDLC — what it is, what it does not do, and where to start.
- [CLI](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/reference/cli/): Every command, subcommand and flag of ak-harness, walked from the program itself.
- [Configuration](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/reference/configuration/): Every path of loop.config.yaml, its type, its default and what it decides. Generated from the schema and the source.
- [Events](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs/reference/events/): Every event the loop writes to its log and emits on its bus, with the fields it carries.

## AgentsKit ecosystem

- [AgentsKit](https://www.agentskit.io/docs) — Build agents without gluing many libraries together.
- [AgentsKit Registry](https://registry.agentskit.io/docs) — Copy ready-made agents and own the source.
- [AgentsKit Chat](https://chat.agentskit.io/docs) — Define one agent experience and deliver it across interfaces.
- [Doc Bridge](https://doc-bridge.agentskit.io/) — Turn repository documentation into executable agent handoffs.
- [AgentsKit Harness](https://harness.agentskit.io/docs) **(current)** — The keep-pushing loop for your SDLC.
- [Agents Playbook](https://playbook.agentskit.io/docs) — Make agents ship code a human would actually merge.
- [AgentsKit Code Review](https://github.com/AgentsKit-io/code-review#readme) — Run deep, low-noise review with the model already in use.
- [AKOS](https://akos.agentskit.io/docs) — Add optional managed operations when production governance calls for it.

## Machine surfaces

- [Full corpus](https://harness.agentskit.io/llms-full.txt)
- [Raw Markdown](https://harness.agentskit.io/raw/)
- [Counts](https://harness.agentskit.io/api/stats.json)