learn-harness-engineering
by walkinglabs
Harness engineering beginner tutorial, from 0 to 1
13,303stars
1,352forks
TypeScript
Added 5/23/2026
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⚠️ Third-Party Software Notice
This skill is third-party open-source software developed and hosted independently on GitHub. SkillsLLM is an informational directory and does not control or maintain the underlying repository.
Any security checks, ratings, or warnings displayed by SkillsLLM are automated and limited in scope. They do not constitute a security certification or guarantee that the software is safe, error-free, or free from malicious code, vulnerabilities, compromised dependencies, or prompt-injection risks.
Review the source code, permissions, dependencies, and configuration before installing or running any third-party skill. Use is at your own risk. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, SkillsLLM is not liable for losses arising from third-party software.
AI Agentsagentagenticagentic-aiaiai-agentai-agentsdshdsh-pluginharnessharness-engineeringharness-frameworkllm
Installation
# Add to your Claude Code skills
git clone https://github.com/walkinglabs/learn-harness-engineeringGetting Started
Guides for using ai agents skills like learn-harness-engineering.
- Caveman: Cut Claude Token Use by 65%How agent-side prompt compression works, when to use it, and when not to.
- What is an AI Skills Marketplace?Definitions, how marketplaces work, and how to choose between them in 2026.
- Getting Started with AI SkillsFirst-time install walkthrough for Claude Code, Codex CLI, and ChatGPT.
Security ReportWarning
Last scanned: 5/23/2026
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"message": "chevrotain: Vulnerability found",
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{
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"message": "chevrotain-allstar: Vulnerability found",
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"message": "dompurify: DOMPurify's ADD_TAGS function form bypasses FORBID_TAGS due to short-circuit evaluation",
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"message": "esbuild: esbuild enables any website to send any requests to the development server and read the response",
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"message": "langium: Vulnerability found",
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{
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"message": "lodash-es: lodash vulnerable to Code Injection via `_.template` imports key names",
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"message": "mermaid: Mermaid Gantt Charts are vulnerable to an Infinite Loop DoS",
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"message": "vitepress: Vulnerability found",
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],
"status": "WARNING",
"scannedAt": "2026-05-23T06:33:33.961Z",
"semgrepRan": false,
"npmAuditRan": true,
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}🌍 This course is available in 15 languages: English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, 한국어, Español, Français, Русский, Deutsch, العربية, Tiếng Việt, Oʻzbekcha, Türkçe, Portuguese (BR), Українська. Choose your language from the badges above.
🆕 What's New — August 2026
Frontier Harness Design Breakdowns — new section (4 breakdowns)
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| New section | Frontier Harness Design Breakdowns — Apply the course's five-subsystem framework (instructions, tools, environment, state, feedback) to reverse-engineer how four frontier products build real harnesses. |
| Pi | How Pi builds its harness — a minimal kernel, programmable expansion, and context engineering behind "ask Pi to build what you want." |
| Claude Code | How Claude Code builds its harness — four-layer memory, five-level compaction, hooks, and sub-agent isolation. |
| Codex | How Codex builds its harness — the repository as source of truth, AGENTS.md as a directory page, and worktree isolation. |
| DeepSeek | How DeepSeek builds its harness — "everything is a plugin," capability seams, and an event pipeline. |
| All 15 languages | Full translation coverage across all supported languages. |
Key idea: The course gives you a framework; these breakdowns show you how the same principles actually play out in production harnesses.
Graph Engineering Update — 1 new lecture, 1 new project
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| Lecture 14 | From Single Loops to Graph Engineering — Why a single loop grows into a graph: the four stacked layers (prompt → context → loop → graph) and where harness sits in that stack, the four parts of a graph (nodes, edges, shared state, routing), why in-loop checkpoints can't fix the three structural failures at scale (Goodhart, blindness upward, conflict), a framework-agnostic six-step walkthrough for building your first graph, graph vs. workflow, anchors, which open-source "graph engineering" projects existed before the name vs. after it, the orchestration tax, and when a graph is actually worth drawing. |
| Project 08 | Draw Your Workflow as a Graph — Three progressive experiments: draw your maker-checker loop as an explicit graph, add a parallel fan-out/fan-in node, then add a conditional rollback edge and a human-approval node. |
Key idea: A loop is a graph with one node. When your task needs specialization, parallelism, shared state, verification, and recovery — it has stopped being a loop. It's a graph.
🆕 What's New — July 2026
Loop Engineering Update — 1 new lecture, 1 new project
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| Lecture 13 | Why You Need to Stop Prompting Your Agent — From /goal to the six primitives of loop engineering (automations, worktrees, skills, connectors, sub-agents, external state), the generator/evaluator split, four silent costs, and a step-by-step guide to building your first loop. |
| Project 07 | Build Your First Automated Loop — Three progressive experiments: goal loop, timer loop, and maker-checker loop. Compare manual vs. automated, measure intervention reduction, and learn to step outside the loop. |
| Code templates | goal-template.md, loop-state-template.md, maker-prompt.md, checker-prompt.md — drop-in templates for building loops immediately. |
| All 15 languages | Full translation coverage across all supported languages. |
Key idea: Harness engineering builds the vehicle. Loop engineering designs the road it drives on — and you design the road from outside the car.
Learn Harness Engineering is a course dedicated to the engineering of AI coding agents. We have deeply studied and synthesized the most advanced Harness Engineering theories and practices in the industry. Our core references include:
- OpenAI: Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
- Anthropic: Effective harnesses for long-running agents
- Anthropic: Harness design for long-running application development
- Awesome Harness Engineering
Quick start? The
skills/harness-creator/skill can help you scaffold a production-grade harness (AGENTS.md, feature lists, init.sh, verification workflows) for your own project in minutes.
Table of Contents
- 🆕 What's New
- ✨ Visual Preview
- What Harness Engineering Actually Means
- Quick Start: Improve Your Agent Today
- Capstone Project: A Real App
- Learning Path
- Syllabus
- Skills
- Other Courses
✨ Visual Preview
🏠 Course Homepage
A comprehensive course outline and introduction to core philosophies, providing a clear path to get started.
📖 Immersive Lectures
Deep dives into real-world pain points and hands-on projects (like Project 01) for an immersive learning experience.
🗂️ Ready-to-Use Resource Library
Templates and reference configurations designed to solve common pitfalls in multi-turn AI agent development, such as context loss and premature task completion.
PDF Coursebooks
The repository now includes a PDF build pipeline for the course content.
- Run
npm run pdf:buildto generate the currently configured PDF coursebooks locally. - Output files are written to
artifacts/pdfs/. - Run
npm run screenshots:readmeif you want to refresh the README preview images. - GitHub Actions workflow
release-course-pdfs.ymlcan build the PDFs and publish them to GitHub Releases.
The Model Is Smart, The Harness Makes It Reliable
There's a hard truth most people learn the hard way: the strongest model in the world will still fail on real engineering tasks if you don't build a proper environment around it.
You've probably seen this yourself. You give Claude or GPT a task in your repo. It starts well — reads files, writes code, looks productive. Then something goes wrong. It skips a step. It brea
Frequently Asked Questions
What is learn-harness-engineering?
learn-harness-engineering is an open-source ai agents skill for AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and ChatGPT, built by walkinglabs. Harness engineering beginner tutorial, from 0 to 1. It has 13,303 GitHub stars.
Is learn-harness-engineering safe to use?
learn-harness-engineering returned warnings in SkillsLLM's automated security scan. It has no critical vulnerabilities, but review the flagged issues in the Security Report section before adding it to your workflow.
How do I install learn-harness-engineering?
Clone the repository with "git clone https://github.com/walkinglabs/learn-harness-engineering" and add it to your Claude Code skills directory (see the Installation section above).
What programming language is learn-harness-engineering written in?
learn-harness-engineering is primarily written in TypeScript. It is open-source under walkinglabs on GitHub, so you can review or fork the full source.
Are there alternatives to learn-harness-engineering?
Yes. SkillsLLM lists many other AI Agents skills you can browse and compare side by side. Open the AI Agents category from the badge at the top of this page, or use the Related Skills and comparison links further down to weigh learn-harness-engineering against similar tools.
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