Harness Skill

When to use

• A design/architecture decision with real trade-offs and no obvious winner → --strategy council.
• A creative-but-constrained problem needing option generation then rigorous pruning → --strategy twobrain.
• A question hinging on current/present-state facts you must not answer from memory → --strategy solo --thinking slow (forces the tool-check pre-pass).

When NOT to use

• Routine coding you can do directly. This spins up external models and costs money; reserve it for genuinely hard sub-decisions.

Limitation (read this)

Claude Code is already an agent loop. This skill does not turn this session into a council — it delegates to the external Kyotee engine and brings the synthesised result back. Think "consult a panel," not "become the panel."

Setup

• Ensure the engine is running (kyotee serve) and KYOTEE_URL points at it (default http://127.0.0.1:8484; HARNESS_URL is honoured too).
• Ensure provider API keys are configured in the engine's config (~/.kyotee/config.yaml; check with kyotee providers).

Usage

Run the CLI and capture the synthesised answer (progress streams to stderr; stdout carries only the answer):

kyotee ask "Should we adopt event sourcing for the billing service?" \
    --strategy council --consensus judge --budget 3.00 --wait

Then incorporate the printed answer (and any noted dissent) into your work.

For machine-readable output add --json, which emits a stable contract:

{
  "task_id": "…",
  "answer": "…",
  "strategy": "council",
  "consensus": { "reached": true, "method": "judge", "rounds_used": 2 },
  "dissent": ["gemini-3-pro favored a simpler queue-based approach"],
  "total_cost_usd": 1.87,
  "total_tokens": 41230
}

dissent is populated when the council deadlocked with noted disagreement or a judge flagged holdouts — surface it rather than presenting false confidence.

Other subcommands: kyotee resume <task_id> --wait, kyotee status <task_id>, kyotee providers, kyotee config validate <file>.

The CLI exits non-zero on engine errors or when the budget was exhausted before any answer was produced; without a running engine it fails fast with a "start kyotee serve / check KYOTEE_URL" message.