Create a harness

A harness is a GitHub repo beside your code that holds a project’s team settings, plans, requirements, findings, skills, prompts and learnings, and where agent sessions run. Projects and harnesses explains why.

Making one

1. Open Org settings › Harness (while the org has none) or Org settings › Projects and click Create Harness.
2. If this is your first project, Gannin first explains what a project and its harness are, and shows the harness’s layout as an annotated tree. Anyone else starts at the name, with the tour a link away.
3. Name the project, check the harness repo’s name (the project’s, ending -harness) and tick the code repos it covers. The busiest are ticked to start.
4. Create. Gannin makes a private repo in the org (or your personal account) and commits a starter layout: a README, a CLAUDE.md listing its repos, a STANDARDS.md for documents, folders for requirements, plans, decisions, findings, learnings, refines, skills and sessions (decisions with a README and a template for decision records), and .gannin/README.md explaining the team files.

The new harness is a project from then on, and the org’s home project if it’s the first. The home project’s harness also holds the org-wide team settings (working week, leave, exclusions, people’s dates and so on).

Using a harness you already have

In Org settings › Projects, Add Project and pick the repo. Then, in Org settings › Harness, say where it’s checked out on this Mac if sessions should run in it.

Changing home

Settings an org kept on this Mac before it had a harness stay on this Mac; nothing copies them into a harness. Once there’s a harness, make it home and set them there. When you make a different project home in Org settings › Projects, Copy the Org’s Data and Make Home copies the org-wide files committed in the old home’s harness to the new one.