Skill: Harness Engineering Reconcile

Philosophy

Coordinate state, not ceremony. he-reconcile identifies the earliest incomplete HE stage and preserves the evidence chain that lets the next agent act immediately. Local AGENTS.md, rules, hooks, command boundaries, and approval gates outrank this skill.

When to Use

Use when HE work spans stages or evidence surfaces and needs refresh, resume control, source-prompt coverage, repeated-failure reconstruction, or conflict resolution.

When Not to Use

Do not use for a single selected implementation slice, plain code fix, isolated docs edit, or solved-problem capture. Route direct execution to the active stage skill and durable learning refresh to he-reinforce.

Inputs

Goal, repo path, tracker state, specs, plans, PRs, validation, session evidence, source-prompt baseline, repeated-failure evidence, or artifact conflict.

Outputs

Return mode, stage map, earliest incomplete stage, owner, blockers, next action, retained references, coverage, repeated-failure state, validation, Codex provenance, PR safety trace status, and handoff.

Preconditions

Resolve canonical repo/source and cited evidence before treating it as fact. Classify side effects before acting. Learning capture is out of scope and must hand off to he-reinforce. Start with 2-3 focused surfaces before widening.

Procedure

1. Reconstruct lifecycle state from live repo, tracker, PR, validation, session, and .harness evidence.
2. When session evidence is in scope, read session-collector public provenance first and report Codex provenance as found, not_found, blocked, or not_applicable before raw transcript or rollout fallback.
3. Resolve only enough context to identify the earliest incomplete, stale, or conflicted stage.
4. If an original prompt, external workflow, manual method, or plugin comparison is the baseline, apply source-prompt coverage before routing. Preserve source status, evidence depth, gaps, not-inspected evidence classes, repo drift

• See references/hot-path-folded-context.md for folded procedure detail.

Validation

Fail fast. Check routing, stage artifacts, source-prompt coverage, tracker/PR links, Project Brain freshness, validation evidence, and handoff authority. Report gates as pass, fail, or blocked. Treat stale tracker, validation, PR, or artifact evidence as degraded, not closure proof. When session evidence is cited, check Codex provenance source, redaction status, proof limits, and PR-safe trace fields; raw local identifiers or transcript/ rollout paths in public text are blockers.

• See references/hot-path-folded-context.md for folded validation detail.

Safety Boundaries

he-reconcile reconstructs state and routes the next stage. Do not collapse multi-stage work into execution, write user/global config, update external systems, refresh Project Brain, create learnings, or perform destructive actions without explicit authority. A route or safe_to_continue status cannot authorize implementation, tracker mutation, sync/install, destructive cleanup,

• See references/hot-path-folded-context.md for folded safety boundaries detail. Redact secrets, credentials, API keys, tokens, PII, and sensitive local data by default.

Failure Handling

If evidence, tracker linkage, source baseline, route, destination, or authority is missing, stop with blocked_reason and the smallest recovery step. Chat summaries cannot replace source, tracker, artifact, PR, validation, or trace evidence. If local proof is strong but tracker state is stale/unavailable, route to closure evidence recovery instead of declaring done.

Handoff Rules

Route brainstorm gaps to he-brainstorm, acceptance gaps to he-spec, strategy gaps to he-plan, implementation to he-work, review to he-code-review, repeated repair tracking to he-linear-plan/Linear, closure proof to he-eval-report, and solved-problem capture to he-reinforce.

Output Format

Structured output: schema_version, mode, stage_map, earliest_incomplete_stage, active_owner, blockers, next_action, source_prompt_coverage, repeated_failure_state, blackboard_delta, retained_references, validation, git_staging_status, staged_paths, codex_provenance, pr_safety_trace, handoff, and blocked_reason.

Examples

• When the user asks to inspect .harness/session-evidence/latest.md and it conflicts with .harness/plan/JSC-246-plan.md, route to the earliest incomplete stage and mark stale plan evidence as degraded.
• When the user asks to validate closure from implementation status alone, route to he-eval-report instead of declaring completion.

Gotchas

• State reconstruction and routing only; not implementation.
• he-reinforce owns new or refreshed .harness/solutions/** and Project Brain learning synchronization.
• Repeated failures may need both Linear tracking and durable learning capture.
• Apply the context-disposition policy: move important still-valid context to references, and intentionally discard stale, duplicated, unsafe, superseded, or low-signal text.

References

Read references/contract.yaml for the full reconcile contract and references/evals.yaml for validation scenarios. Use shared HE references only when active: stage context, coding-harness bridge, source-prompt coverage, plugin-hook capability, UI plan routing, artifact routing, agent-native compression, pragmatic invariants, and XP operating contract. Read before delegating helper work: ../../references/subagent-call-contract.md. Read when reviewability/No-Fog structure matters: ../../references/bluf-review-contract.md. Read when source-of-truth conflicts or route decisions need diagrams: ../../references/visual-reference-contract.md.

• See references/hot-path-folded-context.md for folded references detail.
• ../../references/deferred-context-index.md for folded/discarded context.
• ../../references/closure-mutation-contract.md for closure proof vs live mutation boundaries.
• Apply the context-disposition policy: move important still-valid context to references, and intentionally discard stale, duplicated, unsafe, superseded, or low-signal text.