docs/GLOSSARY.md

Glossary

Agent

An AI coding collaborator operating inside the repository.

Harness

The repo-level operating system that tells humans and agents how to turn intent into safe product changes.

Product Contract

The current expected behavior of the product. Product docs plus executable tests become the living contract once implementation exists.

Story Packet

A story-sized work file or folder that describes the product contract, affected docs, design notes, and validation expectations for a feature.

Feature Intake

The classification step that turns a prompt into tiny, normal, or high-risk work before implementation begins.

Component Taxonomy

A map from Harness files and capabilities to the responsibilities they serve, used to evaluate coverage, attribute failures, and identify missing harness capabilities.

Maturity Level

A verifiable stage in Harness capability, from H0 bare environment through H5 self-improving harness. Each level has required files, criteria, and benchmark indicators.

Trace Quality Tier

The expected depth of a task trace: minimal for tiny work, standard for normal work, and detailed for high-risk work.

Verification Gate

An advisory Harness check that runs or inspects mechanical proof before a task is closed. In Phase 4, story verify <id> executes a story's verify_command, story verify-all runs all configured story proof commands, and trace --story <id> warns when that story's verification has not passed.

Tool Registry

The compiled and registered tool manifest exposed by scripts/bin/harness-cli query tools. It lets agents discover available commands, arguments, responsibilities, and custom project tools.

Intervention

A durable record of human, reviewer, CI, or agent feedback that corrected, overrode, escalated, or approved work. Interventions are stored separately from traces and feed improvement proposals.

Context Score

The advisory result from scripts/bin/harness-cli score-context <trace-id>. It compares a trace's recorded files_read against compiled context rules and retrieval triggers.

Entropy Score

The drift score printed by scripts/bin/harness-cli audit. Lower is better. It counts stale or incomplete durable records such as orphaned stories, unverified proof commands, missing backlog outcomes, and broken registered tools.

Improvement Proposal

A structured recommendation generated by scripts/bin/harness-cli propose from repeated friction, intervention patterns, and audit findings. Proposals are advisory unless committed to the backlog with --commit.

Context Phase

A phase of an agent task that changes what context should be read, such as intake, planning, implementation, validation, or trace recording.

Retrieval Trigger

A condition that tells an agent to fetch additional context, such as touching a database schema, changing a public contract, or discovering missing validation.

Harness Delta

A documentation, template, validation, backlog, or decision update that makes future agent work safer or easier.

Backlog Outcome Loop

The feedback workflow for Harness improvements: record predicted impact when a backlog item is created, then record actual measured outcome when the item is closed so future agents can compare expectation with result.

Durable Layer

The SQLite database and CLI (scripts/bin/harness-cli) that stores operational records (intakes, stories, decisions, backlog items, traces) as structured, queryable data. Policy docs describe how to work; the durable layer stores what happened.

Product Delta

A product-facing change such as code, tests, API shape, data model, or product documentation.

Trace

A structured record of what an agent did during a task: actions taken, files read, files changed, decisions made, errors encountered, outcome, and any harness friction discovered.

Tool Registry

The compiled and user-registered tool manifest exposed by scripts/bin/harness-cli query tools and documented in docs/TOOL_REGISTRY.md.

Intervention

A durable record of a human, reviewer, CI, or agent correction, override, escalation, or approval that is separate from the normal task trace.

Context Score

The advisory result from scripts/bin/harness-cli score-context <trace-id>, which compares a trace's recorded reads against compiled context rules.

Entropy Score

The drift score from scripts/bin/harness-cli audit. Lower scores mean fewer orphaned, stale, unverified, outcome-missing, or broken-tool records.

Improvement Proposal

A structured proposal generated by scripts/bin/harness-cli propose from repeated friction, interventions, and audit drift. Proposals can be committed as backlog items with --commit.