Durable Agent Harness

Public engineering notebook by Alex Lennon (@embedded_iot) under the Chop Wood Carry Water brand — building a durable working relationship with AI coding agents.

🌐 Site: https://chopwoodcarrywater.uk/
📦 Repo: https://github.com/DynamicDevices/durable-agent-harness
🏷️ Baseline: v1.2 (2026-09-12) in BASELINE-v1.2.md · previous v1.1 🤖 Agents: AGENTS.md · https://chopwoodcarrywater.uk/agents.html

First-person voice, short blog, playbook, patterns, and honest measurement — personal brand, not a company brochure.

Topics: ai · agents · cursor · developer-tools · llm · engineering · documentation · productivity

Site SEO includes canonical URLs, per-insight Open Graph / Twitter cards, BlogPosting JSON-LD, RSS, robots.txt, llms.txt, and a real-URL sitemap. Contract: docs/NOTES-SOCIAL-SHARING.md.

What’s inside

Area	What you get
60 minutes	Timed checklist + Codex starter pack (Cursor pack retained)
Codex migration	Portable Agent Skills, AGENTS.md, worktrees/handoff, host-native controls, self-evals
Playbook	Twelve steps to build a thin harness from scratch
Learning	MemPalace memory + Kaizen → Hansei → Toyota Way Practices
Runtime	Preloop (policy/audit under P0) + OpenRouter (multi-model routing) + PR commit checks (preloop status)
Channels & lean	WhatsApp/Briar triage, media ingest, token-lean skills, desktop MCQ, voice, CI checks
Starter kit	Copy-paste templates for skills, rules, patterns, lanes, clocks, capability maps (starters/)
Explore	Timeline, stack, capability map, patterns, glossary/FAQ, research
Cases	Before/after outcomes that show the harness at work
Measure	Tenure clocks, metrics that aren’t fake multipliers, weekly ritual
Insights	What broke / locked / earned a place on disk — sparks in blog-inbox.md, published at EOW
About	Notebook blurb; contributor notes in PRIVACY.md

Local check

npm install
npx playwright install chromium
npm run cards     # regenerate 1200×627 insight cards (Pillow)
npm test          # sync + privacy gate + Playwright (desktop + mobile)
npm run serve     # http://127.0.0.1:4173

Start a private insight package from a rough thought or UTF-8 transcript:

npm run insight:new -- --title "The working title" --text "The first thought"
npm run insight:new -- --title "The working title" --input ~/Downloads/transcript.txt

Drafts default to a private directory outside this public repository and are not published automatically. Use --output-root to select another private location. After publishing the associated LinkedIn post, add its HTTPS URL as discussionUrl so the article invites readers to join that conversation.

content/blog.json is the insight source of truth. npm run sync renders static docs/notes/*.html, feed.xml, sitemap.xml and llms.txt; GitHub Pages serves docs/ from main. Review the PR and local Lighthouse results before merging. After production publish, run new URLs through LinkedIn Post Inspector.

Four clocks (frozen starts)

Clock	Start
Serious hands-on AI	2025-06-06
Cursor as cockpit	2025-07-23
Codex as cockpit	2026-08-30
Versioned harness	2026-05-31

Licence

• Notebook content: CC BY-SA 4.0
• Site code / scripts / tests: MIT

See LICENSE for the split.

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AI-assisted (Codex) under Alex’s direction. Use at your own risk.