Ultimate Harness Documentation
Ultimate Harness is a runtime-agnostic development harness for planning, launching, observing, verifying, and promoting agentic software-development work across multiple coding agents.
Ultimate Harness is a runtime-agnostic development harness for planning, launching, observing, verifying, and promoting agentic software-development work across multiple coding agents.
The core design goal is portable discipline: a project should be able to use multiple coding-agent runtimes without losing its specifications, skills, workflow state, audit trail, sandbox boundaries, or human approval checkpoints.
For the active roadmap (epics, in-flight slices, recently shipped), see the roadmap.
Guides
New to Ultimate Harness? Start with these:
- Quickstart — zero to a verified mission in a few minutes.
- Configuration — project state, adapters, env vars, per-mission overrides.
- Runtime targets — per-adapter invocation shapes.
- Optional telemetry — opt-in, off by default.
- Troubleshooting — common issues and fixes.
- Plugin development — the Hermes dashboard plugin.
Start here
- Glossary — shared terms used across the project.
- Product requirements — what the harness is for and who it serves.
- MVP scope — what must exist before implementation grows.
- Architecture overview — major components and boundaries.
- Core entities — canonical vocabulary for data and artifacts.
- Runtime adapter contract — what every adapter implements (includes the UH-28 runtime-final-message protocol).
- Mission packet schema — the portable work-request format.
- Verification and promotion — how sandbox work becomes canonical work.
- SDD + TDD + cross-runtime QA — the three composable discipline layers (UH-54 / UH-55 / UH-56).
- BMAD agent map — how BMAD-style roles map into Ultimate Harness.
Adapters
| Adapter | Status | Doc / Runbook |
|---|---|---|
hermes | active | Runtime adapter contract defines the shape; src/adapters/hermes.ts is the reference implementation. |
codex | active | Codex adapter design, Codex E2E smoke runbook |
hermes-proxy | active | Hermes proxy adapter design, setup runbook, E2E smoke runbook |
openrouter | active | OpenAI-compat HTTP client for openrouter.ai — cheapest pay-per-token. See OpenRouter setup runbook. |
pi | active | Vanilla pi agent CLI (pi --print --mode json --no-session). See pi setup runbook. |
oh-my-pi | active | Anthropic-via-OMP runbook — covers the Anthropic-via-OMP routing path and its ToS posture; graduated to active in v0.8.0 (#156). |
anthropic | experimental | Native pay-per-token Anthropic Messages API — the official, ToS-clean alternative to the OMP stealth path. API key via ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (env-only); a missing key degrades uh adapter check anthropic gracefully. Shipped v0.9.0 (#214); graduation to active pending live-smoke. |
For issue-level state and upcoming epics, see the roadmap.
Documentation map
Research
Product
Architecture
- Overview
- Entities
- Runtime adapter contract
- Codex adapter design
- Hermes proxy adapter design
- Hermes proxy spike notes
- Mission packet schema
- .harness artifacts
- Skill format
- Sandboxing
- AgentFS sandbox backend (design)
- Verification and promotion
- SDD + TDD + cross-runtime QA
- TUI architecture
Runbooks
- Codex E2E smoke
- Anthropic via oh-my-pi
- Hermes proxy setup
- Hermes proxy E2E smoke
- Using
uh tui - Publishing
Workflows
- Workflow overview
- Research to spec
- Spec to plan
- Plan to mission
- Mission to sandbox
- Verify, review, promote
- BMAD agent map