Projects / ki-agentic-harness
The canonical source of reusable agentic capabilities and compatible harnesses.
A capability here is a typed published member of a compatible harness: a skill, an agent, an MCP server, a hook, an eval, or a future registered kind. The harness defines what each capability contains and what it means. It does not implement the ki executable, and it does not originate portable normative contracts.
Public capability repository · source
The problem
What this is for.
Working conventions that live only in prose erode. An agent applies them if it happens to be told to, and nobody finds out when it was not; a reviewer catches what they have time to read. Holding each standard as a skill that registers its own mechanical checks makes the clear-cut cases deterministic, so attention goes to the parts that genuinely need judgement.
Whose problem
Whether it is yours.
Install it if you want the Knowledge Islands standards applied and checked in your own repositories. It is what `ki bootstrap` installs, and what `ki repo audit` resolves its checks from — you do not read this repository to use it. If you work in a Claude surface that reads plugin marketplaces instead of harnesses, ki-plugins is the projection to reach for.
Capabilities
What it actually does.
- Skills — reusable standards, each registering the operations that audit and conform a target against it.
- Subagents — focused specialist roles an agent can delegate a piece of work to.
- Hooks — optional automation around a coding session, such as plan-mode lifecycle and stale Git-lock recovery.
- Evals — scenarios that check a skill changes behaviour, rather than only that it installed.
- A declared capability-prefix namespace, which is how two installed harnesses are stopped from both claiming to supply the same skill.
State
How finished it is.
The canonical harness: it is what ki bootstrap installs, and it supplies the core user skills an installation needs to describe itself. It cannot be uninstalled, because an installation without it could not report what it has. The skills are the most built-out part; the MCP shelf is scaffolded, and the servers it will hold currently live in their own repositories.
Using it
How to start.
Install a compatible harness with the ki CLI, then activate only the capabilities a piece of work needs.
Guides on this site.
- How the harness works — What an agentic harness is, the five kinds of thing this one bundles, and why the standards live in skills with mechanical checks rather than in prose an agent may or may not read.
- Harnesses — What a compatible harness packages, how one arrives on your machine verified, and why installing it changes nothing about your repositories.
- Repositories — What makes a repository a KI repository, what its .ki.toml declares, and the educate–audit–conform cycle that acts on those declarations.
- Skills and journeys — Understand Knowledge Islands skills, their domains, and the process journey from a live session to governed delivery.
- Choose a skill by outcome — Route a plain-language outcome to the smallest Knowledge Islands skill or journey that serves it.
- Skill catalogue — Browse every capability in the canonical Knowledge Islands harness and learn when to use it.
- Use skills — How a skill actually fires — by trigger or by slash command — how to find the one you want, and what to do when the wrong one loads.
- Onboard a repository — Connect a repository to native KI governance with explicit capability declarations, trusted harnesses, and CI.
- Plan and deliver governed work — Turn a deep audit or transferred concern into implementation-ready, governed roadmap work.
- Tune an agent session — Reduce standing context and runtime cost while retaining the capabilities an agent needs.
Boundaries
What it deliberately does not do.
It publishes capability content and installs nothing. Acquisition, verification and activation belong to the ki CLI, and which capabilities govern a repository belongs to that repository's own declaration — installing a harness activates nothing. Public visibility does not grant a licence to use, copy or redistribute.
Authority
What this repository owns.
Canonical source of capability content and semantics, and of the compatible-harness contract that ki installs against.
That boundary is deliberate. The ecosystem separates philosophy, engineering discipline, capability semantics, portable standards, and executable behaviour so that none of them can quietly absorb another. The full directory shows where this project sits relative to the rest.
Nearby
Other projects of the same kind.
ki-plugins— A Claude plugin marketplace projecting harness skills and agents onto the Cowork surface.
See every public project, or go straight to the released command-line tools.