agent-harness

One source of truth for how my AI agents write and work — shared across every harness (codex, pi, hermes, Claude Code, and whatever comes next), and portable enough to hand to someone else (e.g. Anna) by cloning and running one script.

The problem this solves: each harness reads its operating instructions from a different file, so the same rules end up copied into many places and drift apart. Here the rules live once; the installer wires them into each harness's expected location with symlinks (or, for pi, a shell wrapper). Change a rule in one file and every harness picks it up.

Layout

profiles/
  house-style.md   # the global voice + working rules. The important one.
  seth-mode.md     # an opt-in terse register for code/systems writing (off by default)
install.sh         # idempotent, cross-platform installer
install-ponytail.sh # idempotent installer for the upstream Ponytail skill/plugin
AGENTS.md          # this repo's own short pointer

Install

git clone <this repo> ~/git/agent-harness   # or wherever
sh ~/git/agent-harness/install.sh
sh ~/git/agent-harness/install-ponytail.sh   # optional: lazy senior dev skill/plugin
exec fish   # (or open a new shell) so the pi wrapper loads

Re-run install.sh any time — it's idempotent and backs up any real file it replaces to <file>.bak.<timestamp>. It only touches harnesses that are actually installed.

What it wires

Harness	How it gets the house style
codex	~/.codex/AGENTS.md → symlink to ~/.config/agents/house-style.md
Claude	one @import line appended to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
pi	a fish function (and a POSIX pi-wrapper.sh) that passes --append-system-prompt ~/.config/agents/house-style.md
hermes	reads workspace AGENTS.md automatically; add the import to ~/.hermes/SOUL.md for the global voice

~/.config/agents/ is the neutral runtime path everything points at, so harness configs never reference the git checkout directly.

The three scopes

This repo holds only the global layer. The full picture:

1. Global (every project, every harness) — profiles/house-style.md, installed here.
2. Exceptional Spirits (all es-* repos, shared with Anna) — accounting-for-non-accountants rules and the brand glossary live in the es-ai-ops repo, inherited by every ES project.
3. Per-project — each repo's own AGENTS.md for its specific state and workflow.

A project's AGENTS.md should carry only what's specific to that project; the global voice and the ES rules come from layers 1 and 2.

Adding a harness later

Add one case to install.sh pointing the new tool's instruction file at ~/.config/agents/house-style.md. Nothing else changes.

Ponytail

install-ponytail.sh installs the upstream DietrichGebert/ponytail adapters:

Harness	Install path
pi	pi install git:github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail
codex	codex plugin marketplace add … + codex plugin add ponytail@ponytail
Claude Code	claude plugin marketplace add … + claude plugin install ponytail@ponytail

Ponytail defaults to full mode. Start a new session after installing; use /ponytail off or say normal mode to disable it for a session.

seth-mode

profiles/seth-mode.md is a separate, opt-in writing register (Seth's terse kernel/Plan 9 style) for code and systems writing. It is never a default. In pi: /seth on.