Skill / Harness Boundaries
Reference documentation for Skill / Harness Boundaries in Adaptive Skills.
Goal
State the boundary between a skill and a harness so that skills stay portable and harnesses stay reviewable.
A skill is a procedure: how to think, what to ask, what to produce. A harness is an execution environment: which tools, what autonomy, which gates, which sensors, what logs, what rollback.
The two must not be merged. A skill should run unchanged inside a light harness or a strict one; a harness should govern any skill without rewriting it.
Skill is not harness — a skill defines thinking and output; a harness defines execution conditions and controls.
This sits alongside skill-knowledge-boundaries.md (skill vs. content) — together they keep a skill free of both embedded content and embedded environment.
What a skill carries
- the situation it applies to;
- the questions it asks;
- the moves it executes;
- the criteria it uses;
- the format of its output;
- its handoff signals.
What a harness carries
- the autonomy level the agent may operate at;
- the tools it may use, and at what permission;
- the actions it must never take;
- the gates that guard side effects;
- the sensors expected before judgment;
- the logs and trace required;
- the rollback strategy and human-review requirement.
The harness is declared in an Agent Harness Contract (AletheIA: docs/contracts/agent-harness-contract.md),
with a fill-in template at ../templates/agent-harness-contract.yaml.
Two orthogonal axes
Execution depth and autonomy are different questions. Do not collapse them.
| Axis | Question | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Execution mode | how deep should the work run? | execution-modes.md (basic / extended / high-risk / multi-agent) |
| Autonomy level | how much authority does the agent hold? | Agent Harness Contract (observe / advise / act_with_approval / autonomous_within_bounds) |
A debugging/root-cause run (deep) can still be act_with_approval (gated authority). A
workflow/basic run (shallow) can still be autonomous_within_bounds if its blast radius is
trivial. Pick each axis on its own evidence.