The shwrk harness

The harness is an APM package that makes a repository self-checking. Install it, and every repo exposes the same interface: one command to verify everything (make check), one health endpoint (/health), one set of agent instructions (AGENTS.md), and one convergence test that proves the repo still satisfies the contract.

It is language-agnostic by design. The iron rule: nothing outside a Makefile target body references a specific language. The TypeScript / Cloudflare Workers defaults live in overridable ?= variables — point them at ruff, pytest, cargo, or anything else and the same target names keep working.

Why a harness

Agents are strong at writing code and weak at remembering process. The harness encodes the process so the agent cannot skip it:

One gate. make check runs lint, format, typecheck, test, deadcode, build, and the convergence test. Green means shippable; red prints a To fix: line for every failure.
One contract per surface. /health always looks the same. AGENTS.md always has the same sections. A reviewer (human or agent) always knows where to look.
Non-destructive adoption. Adding the harness to an existing repo merges and extends — it never overwrites your config.

The pieces

Surface	What it is
`Makefile`	The standard target contract. `include Makefile.core`, override the `*_CMD` vars.
`/health`	A uniform JSON health endpoint. 200 = up, anything else = down.
`AGENTS.md`	Lean, mapped agent instructions. `CLAUDE.md` is a symlink to it.
`harness-check`	The convergence test: ten invariants that must hold, each with a fix.
Git hooks	Conventional-commit enforcement + a fast pre-commit lint/typecheck + secret scan.
Skills & agents	OpenSpec workflow, harness-reviewer, app-evaluator, fleet-update, gardener.

Get started

curl -sSL https://harness.shwrk.com/install | bash

Then open the repo in Claude Code and run the harness skill. See Install for what that script does, and Adoption Guide for adopting an existing repo safely.