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Using Skills Inside Harnesses

Reference documentation for Using Skills Inside Harnesses in Adaptive Skills.

Goal

Show how an ordinary skill runs inside a declared Agent Harness Contract (AHC) without changing the skill itself. The harness sets the envelope; the skill executes within it.

The AHC is declared in AletheIA (docs/contracts/agent-harness-contract.md); a fill-in template lives at ../templates/agent-harness-contract.yaml.


How the pieces meet

  1. allowed_skills / blocked_skills — the harness names which skills may run. The skill does not decide this; the contract does.
  2. gates — when a skill’s core move would write, delete, call out, or change structure, the matching gate (before_write, before_delete, before_external_call, before_structural_change) applies before the move commits.
  3. sensors — the sensor-before-judgment rule: a skill should run its computational sensors (tests, linters, type checks) before consulting an inferential one (a review skill).
  4. observability — the skill’s decisions and evidence feed the harness trace (see ../templates/harness-trace-summary.md).
  5. rollback / human_review — for risky or irreversible work, the skill’s output stays a draft until the contract’s human review clears it.

What does not change

  • The skill’s 11 sections, triggers, and verification stay exactly as authored.
  • The skill never embeds tool permissions, autonomy, or rollback — those live in the contract.
  • A skill that was safe under a light harness stays correct under a strict one; only the envelope tightens.

See also

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