Andrej Karpathy put it bluntly: "The agents do not listen to my instructions." They bloat abstractions, copy-paste code blocks, and ignore style guidance, no matter how carefully you write your AGENTS.md. If the person who coined "context engineering" can't get agents to follow written rules, the answer isn't better prompting. It's mechanical enforcement: git hooks that block bad code before it lands, linters that catch what instructions can't, and rule files that load only when relevant so the agent's finite attention isn't wasted.
Harness engineering is context engineering applied to coding agents: structuring rule files, planning before building, enforcing quality with automation, and keeping documentation in sync with code so the agent stays aligned across long sessions.
This repo contains:
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A reference guide that maps 20+ best practices from OpenAI, Augment Code, Anthropic, and practitioners like Andrej Karpathy (AI researcher, co-founder of OpenAI), Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code), and Thariq Shihipar (Claude Code team at Anthropic) to concrete implementation patterns.
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A Claude Code plugin that configures your developer environment for agent-assisted development. Install the plugin and get two skills that do the actual work:
/readiness: Analyzes any existing codebase and produces a scored readiness report across 8 pillars and 5 maturity levels. Shows you exactly where you stand, what's missing, and what to fix first. Saves reports for delta tracking over time. Works with any language or stack./setup: Configures your project end-to-end through Socratic questioning. It scaffolds CLAUDE.md files, installs enforcement scripts (secret scanning, file size limits, test colocation, auto-generated docs, drift detection), wires up git hooks that run those scripts on every commit and push, sets up linter/formatter configs, and creates .claude/settings.json with safe permission defaults. The scripts and hooks it installs are the enforcement layer. They catch what instructions and prose cannot. Supports any language or stack; Node/TypeScript is the recommended default for web projects, but the skill adapts to Python, Go, Rust, C/C++, and more.
Table of Contents
Quick Start
Prerequisites: Claude Code with plugin support, Git, and Node.js (v18+) for Node/TypeScript projects.
1. Install the plugin
In Claude Code, run:
/plugin marketplace add jrenaldi79/harness-engineering
/plugin install harness-engineering@harness-engineering
That's it. Once installed, you don't need to remember any commands. Just ask naturally:
