ADR 0007: Harness Engineering Toolkit Naming

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-05-02 Deciders: Alex Furrier Generated from: Naming brainstorm and implementation slice Plan: .ai/plans/2026-05-02-083917-harness-kit-naming/

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Context

The repo had grown two related but distinct products:

1. A starter template for new agent-ready repositories.
2. A portable CLI for applying planning, validation, and handoff workflows to existing repositories without committing scaffold files.

The old names blurred that boundary. agent-scaffold described the template but not the broader tool family. agent-workflow described the portable CLI but felt generic and did not carry the harness-engineering framing. agent-harness or harness fit the theme but conflicted with common usage: Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Cursor, and similar coding environments are themselves agent harnesses.

Decision

Adopt Harness Engineering Toolkit as the umbrella/product-family name.

Use these names for the two concrete surfaces:

Surface	Name	Command
Portable workflow toolkit	harness-kit	hk and harness-kit
Starter template	harness-scaffold	harness-scaffold

The Python package is named harness-toolkit and uses the import package harness_toolkit so both surfaces can ship together while the project is small.

Docs should describe the split as:

Use hk when adding the workflow to an existing repo. Use harness-scaffold when starting a new repo with the workflow, task contract, docs, and CI already wired in.

Consequences

Positive:

• The daily portable CLI is short enough for repeated agent/human use: hk.
• The readable long name, harness-kit, anchors docs and package metadata.
• harness-scaffold keeps the template action clear while fitting the product family.
• The naming avoids implying that the project is itself a coding harness runtime.

Negative / Trade-offs:

• This is a breaking rename from the earlier agent-scaffold and agent-workflow command names.
• Existing docs, tests, generated snippets, and task wrappers must move together to avoid mixed vocabulary.
• Historical ADR IDs may still include agent-scaffold; those are treated as historical identifiers, not current product names.

Alternatives Considered

Alternative	Reason not chosen
Keep agent-scaffold and agent-workflow	Accurate enough but did not express the Harness Engineering Toolkit boundary
agent-harness / harness	Too easy to confuse with Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Cursor, or other agent harness runtimes
harness-eng-toolkit as the command	Clear as a phrase, too long for a daily CLI
agent-loop / agent-plan / agent-slice	Useful descriptors, but weaker product-family framing
baton / rig	Memorable, but less explicit than hk / harness-kit