anastasiyaw/codex-claude-code-config/harness-feedback

Harness Feedback

Treat "the harness is too strict" as an engineering finding, not as permission to disable a safety check. Find the boundary that owns the mismatch and move the check to the narrowest profile that actually needs its evidence.

Profiles

Use these profiles unless the project has a more specific, documented contract:

staging-smoke must not require signing, production credentials, a release certificate, or a long VM stress run. security-proof may run on an unsigned staging build when its claim is source or runtime behavior. A release check may remain blocking for release promotion without becoming a per-edit gate.

Feedback Loop

For every overload signal, record:

1. requested profile and change boundary;
2. gate that blocked or dominated the run;
3. command, elapsed time, failure count, and evidence actually produced;
4. whether the gate was relevant, duplicated, flaky, or misplaced;
5. the smallest profile split or deletion of duplicate coverage;
6. a before/after run of the affected profile and a fresh review of the rule.

Use the deterministic harness-load-advisor.py signal as an intake event. It stores metadata outside the repository and forces the final report to name the mismatch. Durable policy changes belong in Git; raw session traces do not.

Required Report

Do not write "overkill" and move on. Report:

Harness feedback: OVERLOAD | CLEAR
Requested profile: staging-smoke | security-proof | release-attestation | nightly-stress
Mis-scoped gate: <name>
Evidence: <command, result, elapsed time, or explicit missing proof>
Correction: <profile split or rule change>
Verification: <before/after commands and result>
Residual risk: <what remains intentionally gated and where>

Gotchas

• A fresh evaluator is an independence control, not a release-signing check.
• A VM can be a reusable execution environment without forcing release identity

checks into every VM smoke.

• A green fast gate does not prove release readiness; a red release-only gate

does not invalidate a staging smoke unless the staging claim depends on it.

• Do not replace a misplaced gate with retries, sleeps, or a bypass marker.
• Do not infer overload from one slow run; distinguish environment failure from

a profile contract error.

Troubleshooting