Team-Wide Agentic Harness

Most of what I've learned about running AI agents lives on my own machine and nowhere else. The Linear-management skill, the sandbox conventions, the notes about how our releases work: all of it sits in my personal setup, invisible to the rest of the team. So I'm building a team-wide agentic harness, a checked-in repository of agent config, skills, and evergreen context that everyone can share, review, and improve.

Brown bags and checked-in skills

We've been running AI brown bag sessions, informal knowledge-transfer where everyone trades tips on how they actually use agents day to day. A lot of what comes out of those is concrete and shareable. I've been showing off skills like a Linear-management skill that reviews our queue, checks progress against the roadmap, organizes releases, and generates release notes tailored to specific customers.

Those are easy to share because they're files. You check them in and someone else can run them.

The parts that don't check in

But a big chunk of using agents well isn't a file. It's convention.

Most of us run agents in sandboxes. The most important rule there is to scope all the work into a single directory. You give the sandbox access to the directory you're working in and nothing outside of it, save a few exceptions. That has downstream consequences: temporary files go in a tmp directory, worktrees go in a worktrees subdirectory, and none of that gets checked in.

A plans or notes directory helps too, a loosely organized bucket of agent output artifacts. You can search and read them with something like Obsidian.

The harness

I want to go a step further and check in an entire top-level directory. I call it the harness.

The idea came from The AI-Native Startup Handbook, though really it just codified something I was already doing. I check out repos and do all my work in one top-level directory. It isn't a monorepo. It's a top-level directory that everything about the company or the larger project can reach: multiple repos, research, notes, plans, skills. Once I looked at it as a unit, a lot of it turned out to be shareable.

The other important piece is evergreen content. Descriptions of the company, the product, and procedures we do often, like how releases work and how we use Linear as a team. Those live in an evergreen docs directory so agents have a grounding point, a place to start from where they already understand the product and the value we're delivering.

Why check it in at all

The strongest argument is simple: skills are code. A skill is a set of instructions an agent executes, and any code change should be reviewed. Treating the harness as a repo means it gets a pull request, a diff, and another set of eyes before it changes how everyone's agents behave.

I've been running all of this myself so far. It works for me. The next step is handing it to the team and seeing whether conventions that live comfortably in one person's head survive contact with everyone else's.