Spice Harness is an agent harness / fleet operations console.
Simultaneous Production, Integration, and Control Environment.
spice is an installed, repo-native harness for operating coding agents. It treats the agent transcript as the source of truth and the repository filesystem as the steering channel; supervision, task routing, git pressure, live feedback, and hygiene gates are derived from those two surfaces.
It is built for agents moving fast in parallel: every correction is durable, every task boundary is observable, and the gate catches structural drift before it lands.
spice is building itself, but it was not created in a vacuum: the loop was born from a harsher polyglot environment where many languages, conventions, and agent lanes had to survive contact with one another.
Operator steering arrives in the live stream; an assistant ACK retires the exact inbox key from the durable filesystem queue.
- Semantic ACKs: steering is not considered handled until the agent acknowledges the durable key in assistant prose.
- Task allocation:
spice task nextowns work selection; task boundaries own git synchronization and review phases. - Conscience: curated maxims judge assistant prose while work is still in flight, then route violations back as ordinary steering.
- Constitution: pre-commit and
spice study ...enforce repository shape, file/routine limits, env policy, reachability, assertion density, private internals, and commit-message rules. - Serve UI:
spice serveexposes lanes, teams, live transcripts, steering, attachments, task routing, and browser-visible diagnostics.
See docs/overview.md for the operating model and docs/interface.md for the serve UI.
| Surface | Command |
|---|---|
| Prepare a repo | spice init / spice doctor |
| Run through the agent wrapper | spice agent run -- <cmd> |
| Maintain a worktree-bound agent | spice agent ensure / spice agent supervise |
| Pull allocator work | spice task next |
| Rehydrate context | spice session briefing |
| Open the operator UI | spice serve |
| Run studies and gates | spice study ... / git pre-commit hook |
Configuration lives in CONFIG.md. The design contract lives in DESIGN.md. Wrapper command behavior is detailed in docs/cli/wrapper-commands.md. Stability expectations for extensions and command coupling live in STABILITY.md.
uv tool install -e /path/to/spice-main
# or, for the released package:
uv tool install spice-harness
cd /path/to/your/repo
spice init
spice doctorThe default install is a uv tool. Operators who deploy from a main tree should
use the editable form so the installed spice command resolves to that tree;
that editable main tree is the server deployment. Other worktrees remain
operated trees and do not supply their own runtime.
RTK, the local judge, and speech synthesis are optional companions. When they are unavailable, spice keeps the transcript, steering, task board, and constitution working; only compaction, maxim feedback, or audio narration degrade. Runtime and configuration details are in CONFIG.md.
Release workflow is documented in docs/release.md. Most
users only need to know that releases are cut from clean synchronized worktrees
through the repository's mounted spice release command.
Work in progress toward a standalone, releasable product. The loop described
here is real, exercised daily, and guarded by the same constitution that
spice init installs elsewhere.