Harness Evaluate

Evaluate a reference capability against the maintained shared harness. Read the candidate's canonical source, relevant prior ledger decision and closest local implementation. Reference repositories remain read-only evidence.

Compare behavioral gain, overlap, dependencies, context cost and maintenance. Choose reject/defer, merge into an existing capability, a separate plugin for a distinct dependency/domain boundary, or shared template adoption for broadly useful low-cost guidance. Use harness-skill-compare for a substantive comparison.

Evaluation alone produces a recommendation. Record a curation decision only when ledger changes are authorized, in the open round (harness_lifecycle/registry/README.md §5–§5c, method in harness_lifecycle/playbook.md). An upstream skill is ruled trait by trait, each event citing a sealed report (--json with report); a skill without an accepted analysis may only be ruled whole as defer, reject or out-of-scope (--whole-skill). Other capabilities get one event each. A defer carries revisit_when:

uv run python harness_lifecycle/registry/registry.py record --kind <reject|defer|out-of-scope|adopt|adopt-merged> --subject <repo>:<logical_id> --why <reason> --evidence <path:line or registry/reviews/<file>>

Authorized adoption edits the actual canonical source. Shared policy belongs in AGENTS.md and shared skills/project docs; Codex integration links or adapts them. Do not duplicate semantic edits across provider directories. Inspect current sync and publish manifests before selecting destination; template output is generated.

For template adoption, verify the initialized mvp-harness tools exist, run check-sync.sh and build-template.sh under its mvp-plugin scripts directory, and inspect neutrality/leak results. Obtain independent review when the broad blast radius warrants it under shared delegation policy. New/existing plugin implementation also requires authorization for that submodule work.

Record adopt or adopt-merged with --skill <our-skill> only after the adopted state exists. For adopt-merged, pass the adaptation (merged_from, modifications, deliberately_dropped) with --json. The source commit and content hash are filled from the catalog. Then run registry.py build; skill records are generated, never edited. Publication, commits and pointer updates require their own existing authority; otherwise report the prepared result. Borrow the smallest useful pattern.