A harness is a repo, not a tool.

Inside it live two kinds of files: your org's steering documents — the standards that took years to settle (component library, API patterns, auth, data conventions) — and the actual product work: specs, decisions, discovery notes, prototypes. An AI coding agent works inside that repo and reads both before it generates anything. That's the whole mechanism. Ask it to build a feature and it builds one that already follows your conventions, because the conventions were sitting right next to the request.

That single fact resolves most of what looks complicated from outside.

It resolves the roles question nobody asked yet. The PM's job doesn't change: supply intent, judgment, and the definition of “good.” What changes is that intent now produces something real — a working prototype, not a document describing one — because the agent does the mechanical work: reading the standards, writing the code, generating the requirements and test cases that match what got built. Nobody hands the PM a repo to administer. A team lead opens one empty project repo per initiative — the only step that needs someone else's permissions — the agent clones it and configures itself, and the PM starts working. The org's harness itself, the templates every project inherits, was generated once the same way, when the org first adopted the framework.

It resolves the adoption question the same way. Because the work lives as files that accumulate — decisions, specs, standards, requirements — what an org can do with the harness on day one (prototypes and specs in the repo, no new tooling) is naturally less than what it can do once teams are ready to tie work to measured outcomes, and less still than full test-driven, continuously-validated delivery. The framework doesn't gate this. Your org's own habits do. Adoption is a path because the repo is cumulative, not a switch because the software is capable.

One repo, two kinds of files, one agent reading both, one PM supplying what only a PM can. Everything downstream — the tiers, the setup steps, the role guides — is that model playing out in more detail.

Full Overview  ·  In Plain Terms  ·  The Adoption Path  ·  Setup

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