The Harness

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What “harness” means

Console runs an agentic loop: a model reasons, calls tools, reads the results, and reasons again, inside an isolated environment with access to your code. Building that loop — the orchestration, the tool implementations, the sandboxing, the sub-agent delegation, the event streaming — is Console’s job. Deciding what the loop should do is yours. Console exposes three authorable primitives for that, and everything else in the product is built on top of them. The distinction between them is worth getting right, because it’s the most common early mistake:

• An agent is who is working. It has its own model, tool permissions, and budget.
• A skill is how to do one thing well. It has no budget of its own — an agent loads it when the task calls for it.
• A detection is what to look for. It’s the durable artifact: a finding describes one moment, a detection keeps checking forever.

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Yours are first-class

Console ships a library of agents, skills, and detections. Anything you write sits alongside them with no second-class status — the orchestrator that runs workflows treats platform and organization agents identically, briefing both from their stated description. An agent you write with the same name as a built-in one shadows it. That’s the supported way to customize built-in behavior without breaking workflows that already reference that name.

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The tool surface is the ceiling

An agent can only do what some tool lets it do. However you word its instructions, its real capabilities are the union of the tools it’s allowed to call — reading and writing files, running commands, querying code structure, scanning, fetching a URL, reading your vendors’ findings, recording results, and spawning sub-agents. This is the single most useful thing to internalize before writing an agent, because it tells you which tasks are achievable and which aren’t. The full inventory is in the tool reference.

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How the pieces run together

A realistic chain uses all three primitives at once:

1. A workflow step spawns your agent.
2. The agent activates a skill for the vulnerability class it’s investigating.
3. It runs stored detections against the repository.
4. It records findings, and optionally a patch.
5. A workflow output posts the result to the pull request.

Each layer is replaceable. That’s the point of a harness.

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Next steps