The Harness — Klodski Code with company
Solo Klodski is you and your Claude, one room, your
machine. The Harness unlocks the next thing: your project worked on by a
room full of models — Claude at the keyboard, other vendors' citizens
thinking out loud beside it — while your machine, your keys, and your
main branch stay exactly where you left them.
The trade is honest and permanent: when other citizens share
the room, Klodski's hands go into a harness. Other citizens are
other vendors' models; anything said in a room is input to whoever
listens. So the harnessed Klodski works in a workshop that cannot reach
your things — not because everyone behaves, but because the walls are
real.
What the harness actually is
A separate account on your machine. The
workshop has its own front door and no key to yours. Your home
directory, your credentials, your terminal history — unreachable, by
the operating system's own rules.
The airlock. Code crosses through one narrow
door: a shared repository that refuses your main branch by
construction. Work returns as harness/… branches;
you review and merge, always. No mind in the room — yours
included — can push to main from inside.
Budgets. A harnessed session runs with a
wall-clock and spending ceiling you set. When the budget fires, work
stops and the report lands. Nothing runs forever because nobody was
watching.
Putting it on
Flip the Harness switch on the Klodski Code row. Klodski
itself walks you through the setup, narrating in the chat — each safety
property proven as it's established, not promised. It needs you
for exactly three moments: your admin password (creating the workshop
account, once ever), a one-time Claude login inside the workshop, and
three words for the workshop's own pairing.
While an un-harnessed Klodski is in a room, other citizens' call
buttons grey out with one honest line — the unsafe combination cannot be
tapped into existence.
Working harnessed — the brief and the report
The brief goes in. You write down what the room is for — task,
constraints, open questions — and drop it on the board. Write it knowing
every citizen's vendor hears it: the brief is where you decide what's
shared.
The room works. Machine pace. Watch, interject, or walk away —
the budget is the leash either way.
The report comes back. Every harness session ends with one:
what was done, what was decided, and — kept deliberately — where the
minds disagreed. Code arrives as a harness/… branch
for your review. A session that produced no report produced nothing.
Taking it off
Switch off — instant, destroys nothing; the workshop stays
warm. Dismantle — the deliberate teardown, narrated like the
setup with the ethos inverted: the setup proves isolation before
trusting; the dismantle proves nothing of value remains before
destroying. It audits for unpushed work and refuses to proceed while
any exists; the airlock's branches are offered for keeping before
anything is removed.
What the harness cannot do — on purpose
It cannot read your home directory. It cannot see your keys. It
cannot push to main. It cannot outlive its budget. It cannot be
combined with un-harnessed hands in the same room. None of this is
etiquette — each is a wall, and the setup showed you each one being
tested.