harness-engineering-lifecycle

Skill Steward

Engineering Stewardship for agent-operated repositories — apps, libraries, tools, plugins, harnesses, and meta repos. Skill Steward gives humans and agents a shared structural layer for charter, decisions, docs, quality gates, release legibility, safe handoff, and evidence-backed contract proof.

One simple way to understand Skill Steward: it gives humans and agents a shared stewardship language for repositories as they grow. A small repo can be like a few books on a table; as it grows, it needs shelves, signs, a catalog, local tools when they are useful, and organizing principles so people can find the right thing, keep proof honest, and hand work off without getting lost.

In this repo, start with the map, choose the skill that matches the job, use the repo's native validation, and leave the next person or agent a clear path.

It ships through Agent Skills plus a bounded steward CLI for repo-local registration, validation, contract proof, adoption checks, and read-only ecology routing. Agent Skills are the portable delivery surface; the object of stewardship is the repository as a whole.

Charter: docs/NORTH_STAR.mdx · Docs: docs.page/arenukvern/skill_steward · docs.json
Why / how: docs/DESIGN_FAQ.mdx · docs/DX_FAQ.mdx · Repo quality contracts · Decisions · AGENTS.md

skills.sh

Adopt this when

Skill Steward does not make those repos good by assertion; it gives them a structure for proving what is good.

How this fits my other work

Same thread: useful docs for humans and agents, mechanical gates, and work worth people's time. See FAQ-driven development for the documentation shape this repo dogfoods.

Install

Skills (npx skills)

# Install all stewardship skills (project scope)
npx skills add arenukvern/skill_steward

# Install a specific skill
npx skills add arenukvern/skill_steward --skill repo-quality-system-lifecycle
npx skills add arenukvern/skill_steward --skill repository-governance-lifecycle

# Install globally
npx skills add arenukvern/skill_steward -g

# Target specific agents while iterating
npx skills add arenukvern/skill_steward -a cursor -a claude-code -a codex -a zed -y

Discover available skills on skills.sh or search them in the terminal:

npx skills find steward

Steward CLI

The CLI installer is a trust boundary: it downloads a released binary, verifies that binary against the release checksums.txt, installs schemas beside it, and can put steward in ~/.local/bin by default. It does not prove third-party skill sources are safe. By default it prints PATH setup instructions; pass --update-path only when you want it to edit your shell startup file.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Arenukvern/skill_steward/main/install.sh | bash
# Pinned, when a rollout needs an exact release:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Arenukvern/skill_steward/vX.Y.Z/install.sh | bash -s -- --version vX.Y.Z

The CLI validates Skill Steward skills and can apply repo-local skills.json installs/updates with pinned refs. steward install/update copies selected skill directories into agent-readable folders, skips dotfiles, may translate SKILL.md frontmatter for target agents, and advances skills.json commit pins only after a successful copy. Use npx skills for normal public skill installation and updates. See portable Steward invocation before copying command blocks into adoption evidence.

For repo ecology passes, steward ecology snapshot --json gathers read-only inventory for decisions about what to compress, merge, update, remove, create, or move into checks. It is not a maturity verdict and does not run repo actions.

Maintainer local override

Use local paths only while developing Skill Steward itself, and keep them out of public adopter instructions:

npx skills add <skill-steward-checkout> -a cursor -a claude-code -a codex -a zed -y
cd <skill-steward-checkout>/packages/steward_cli && dart run :steward validate

First honest claim

Start by asking what you can honestly claim right now. Use the broad repo-quality baseline for S0/S1 claims; add harness proof only when the repo needs typed actions, probes, or benchmark evidence.

adopt creates the S0/S1 stewardship baseline with stewardship.harness.enabled: false, actions: {}, and probes: {}. Those empty maps are valid baseline state, not missing harness proof. adopt --with-harness adds the first quick-safe action and probe; it also adds a smoke scenario when a durable git remote and HEAD commit are available. A durability_blocked benchmark is