Godharness logo

Godharness: Temporary Product Brief

Status: Working notes — not a Viewstone product document Date: 2026-08-05

Problem

Coding agents can enforce deterministic rules after changing code, but they do not automatically know a repository's architecture decisions, product intent, engineering practices, or the rationale behind policies. Raw documentation is easy to miss, too broad to load in full, and difficult to keep structurally healthy.

Desired Outcome

Godharness gives coding agents the right engineering context before they act. It ships a small, versioned, opinionated default suite of best practices and lets each repository add its own standards, decision records, product context, and service-specific guidance.

Product Positioning

Godharness is an agent-context and documentation-governance framework. It is related to Oh My Claude Code and Superpowers in that it supports coding-agent workflows, but its job is distinct:

  • Workflow frameworks prescribe how an agent works.
  • Godharness supplies the project-specific and default context the agent needs to make sound decisions.
  • Godlint deterministically verifies the codifiable subset in code and CI.

The family promise is:

Godharness helps agents understand the project. Godlint makes sure the project stays true to what it decided.

Relationship to Godlint

Godlint and Godharness have deliberately different authority boundaries.

Product Authority Example
Godharness Guidance before a change "Validate untrusted data at runtime boundaries."
Godlint Deterministic enforcement after a change "Do not read environment variables outside the configured boundary."

Godharness handles decisions that cannot safely be inferred from syntax:

  • product intent and non-goals;
  • architecture tradeoffs and ADRs;
  • testing philosophy and recovery strategy;
  • domain vocabulary and service ownership;
  • instructions for evaluating ambiguous cases.

Godlint handles objective, explainable checks against source and workflows. Godharness must not claim that injecting guidance proves compliance; Godlint, tests, review, and other deterministic checks remain the proof mechanisms.

Version 1 Scope

Godharness v1 is a local-first, installable CLI with Markdown and Git as the source of truth. It has no user interface and no Obsidian integration in v1.

Recommended suite

recommended@1 ships a small, curated, versioned set of broadly useful standards, such as:

  • testing and verification;
  • error handling;
  • small focused units;
  • security and secrets hygiene;
  • configuration boundaries;
  • CI expectations;
  • documentation and decision-record practices.

The suite is not injected wholesale. The resolver selects a tiny universal core plus standards relevant to the task and changed paths. Suites must remain small enough that their context is useful rather than generic noise.

Repository context

Repositories compose the default suite with their own Markdown standards, architecture decisions, product context, playbooks, and service-specific guidance. Project content can refine the default guidance without copying it.

Illustrative configuration:

version: 1
suites: [recommended@1]

standards:
  - docs/engineering/**
  - docs/process/**
  - docs/architecture/**

adapters:
  codex: true
  claude-code: true
  pi: true

Commands

The initial CLI surface should be small:

godharness init
godharness check
godharness context --prompt "..."
godharness context --paths services/api/src/auth.ts
godharness doctor
  • init creates the configuration and starter standards.
  • check validates document schema, links, classification, selectors, and adapter configuration.
  • context resolves the standards and decisions relevant to a prompt or set of changed paths in a deterministic machine-readable form.
  • doctor validates local installation and adapter wiring.

Installing

  • Homebrew: brew install tomerwave/tap/godharness
  • cargo: cargo install godharness-cli
  • npm: npm install --global @godharness/cli
  • pip: pip install godharness

This repository keeps its own installed copy current automatically: .github/workflows/self-update.yml runs godharness update whenever a new version releases and commits any resulting change directly to main.

Technical Direction

Build the core in Rust.

Reasons:

  • a single fast binary works locally and in CI without Node or Bun;
  • the resolver, validator, configuration model, diagnostics, and release approach align with Godlint;
  • it supports deterministic, local-first behavior and cross-platform installs;
  • thin agent-specific adapters can call the binary and consume JSON rather than duplicating matching logic.

The existing Viewstone TypeScript harness is a useful reference implementation, not the product core. It proves three useful mechanisms:

  • prompt-keyword matching;
  • changed-path glob matching;
  • adapters for Codex, Claude Code, and Pi that inject selected context.

The extracted core should use a real YAML/frontmatter parser and schema validation rather than preserving the current hand-written parser.

Required Product Properties

  • Deterministic resolution: no LLM decides which context is mandatory.
  • Local-first: repository source and context stay local by default.
  • Markdown and Git native: standards and decisions remain reviewable and portable.
  • Explainability: users can answer "why was this injected?".
  • Versioned suites: recommended@1 remains stable when future suites change.
  • Scoped context: support universal, task, path, service, and repository scope.
  • Conflict handling: define precedence and surface contradictory standards.
  • CI validation: prevent broken links, malformed metadata, unindexed standards, stale ownership, and adapter drift.

Explicit Non-Goals for v1

  • No graphical interface, desktop application, or Obsidian integration.
  • No generic notes app or knowledge graph.
  • No vector search/RAG as the policy-selection mechanism.
  • No LLM-driven enforcement or opaque context selection.
  • No duplicate source-code linter; Godlint owns deterministic source and workflow policy.
  • No automatic invention of engineering standards.

Later Possibilities

An Obsidian-like product experience could be valuable later for authoring, exploring relationships, ownership/review dates, contradictions, and context previews. It must remain a view over the Git-backed Markdown source of truth, not replace it.

Future Godlint integration can map a finding to its relevant Godharness standard so developers receive both the deterministic violation and the decision rationale.

Risks

  • A large default suite will become generic prompt noise and be ignored.
  • Simple keyword and glob matching can over-match or miss relevant context.
  • Injecting a rule does not prove an agent followed it.
  • Project-specific standards can conflict unless precedence and ownership are explicit.
  • A UI too early would distract from the core resolution and validation loop.

Open Decisions

  • Adapter protocol and installation model for each supported agent.
  • The first Godlint-to-Godharness rationale-linking contract.
  • Conflict-reporting between two standards whose content disagrees (as opposed to resolution order, which is decided — see below).

Decided since this section was first written, with the implementation in crates/godharness-core:

  • Standard frontmatter schema and selectors: id, title, keywords, paths, must-read, supersedes, relates-to; word-boundary keyword matching; glob path matching.
  • Resolution precedence: a must-read standard always resolves regardless of prompt or changed paths; supersedes suppresses the standard it names; relates-to surfaces a neighbor alongside a match.
  • Extension model: a repository adds standards through the standards globs in godharness.yaml. Overriding an existing standard means superseding it under a new id — reusing an existing id is a duplicate-id error, not a silent override.
  • The minimal universal core every task receives: whichever standards are marked must-read.

Project links

Data verified by PyPI on Aug 9, 2026
Data provided by the project maintainers, verified at the time the release was uploaded to PyPI.

Key dates

PyPI data
Data sourced directly from PyPI's database.
  • Released:
Newer release available (0.1.7)

1 maintainer

PyPI data
Data sourced directly from PyPI's database.
Avatar for tomerwave from gravatar.com tomerwave

GitHub Statistics

Data verified by PyPI on Aug 9, 2026
The GitHub source repository was provided by the project maintainers and verified by PyPI at the time of upload. Stars, forks, and open issues/PRs are derived from that repository and have not been independently verified.

License

MIT License (MIT)

Requires

Python >=3.8

Classifiers

Report project as malware

Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distributions

No source distribution files available for this release.See tutorial on generating distribution archives.

Built Distributions

If you're not sure about the file name format, learn more about wheel file names.

godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-win_amd64.whl (3.2 MB view details)

Uploaded Python 3Windows x86-64

godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_x86_64.whl (4.7 MB view details)

Uploaded Python 3musllinux: musl 1.2+ x86-64

godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_aarch64.whl (4.3 MB view details)

Uploaded Python 3musllinux: musl 1.2+ ARM64

godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whl (4.7 MB view details)

Uploaded Python 3manylinux: glibc 2.17+ x86-64

godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.whl (4.5 MB view details)

Uploaded Python 3manylinux: glibc 2.17+ ARM64

godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl (3.8 MB view details)

Uploaded Python 3macOS 11.0+ ARM64

godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-macosx_10_12_x86_64.whl (3.9 MB view details)

Uploaded Python 3macOS 10.12+ x86-64

File details

Details for the file godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-win_amd64.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-win_amd64.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 3.2 MB
  • Tags: Python 3, Windows x86-64
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? Yes
  • Uploaded via: twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14

File hashes

Hashes for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-win_amd64.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 a5f8d70da1512892c5971d5701e91f4f6507f42c1996454ed7952b8b815d01c4
MD5 aae1b8a6b0f817844821098cba651c4e
BLAKE2b-256 d004be51e46f72f7efc62ae0b9bb51376c5b70bd2fe3c14a9e6c6ecb01f28e23

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-win_amd64.whl:

Publisher: release.yml on tomerwave/godharness

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

File details

Details for the file godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_x86_64.whl.

File metadata

File hashes

Hashes for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_x86_64.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 95ee5d8f7ef775bfa2175a9d36036f55d811b1c3e262946ddccaa5ac0d792132
MD5 f53fca3ae21b11319b0c0d8c8403108d
BLAKE2b-256 255392f88acb5e05b199736e7bf1f37d3bd4bc4b2d70a21629c1efad77a18e6f

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_x86_64.whl:

Publisher: release.yml on tomerwave/godharness

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

File details

Details for the file godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_aarch64.whl.

File metadata

File hashes

Hashes for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_aarch64.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 3579b16823b14118dc418f390d5097b63dea748ee4f54d043f45db74f681f136
MD5 62786631649b92121e374f038b226f9e
BLAKE2b-256 d892ea34a3280207c7bd1cbfae52d96158e98805ad336a325a72ff9e9d4d966a

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_aarch64.whl:

Publisher: release.yml on tomerwave/godharness

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

File details

Details for the file godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whl.

File metadata

File hashes

Hashes for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 a052ab4bfdf06fbb82373595a8ce3ca7628d31137432885c011975194c80d4df
MD5 f6eb7d2ffad12a2810c0b4bdd60e7017
BLAKE2b-256 929e03ba97be5a8dc32af02c4ca777c60ad739f876b44aa564d03370e5a2cbf0

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whl:

Publisher: release.yml on tomerwave/godharness

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

File details

Details for the file godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.whl.

File metadata

File hashes

Hashes for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 cac4fc71dedce0dcb546fc0df806e5562cd3c9d31541586fd23d000a498d8ecb
MD5 a31a7ae2c761977e9a3a89ca3d3c13a0
BLAKE2b-256 cda73bbe7748f23ef280899ebd10aefd281bd6d41ec2c86941c6cbc1b3f81664

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.whl:

Publisher: release.yml on tomerwave/godharness

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

File details

Details for the file godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl.

File metadata

File hashes

Hashes for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 f43e06b8001cf3f7f117be6b43b366c064bf8e3bb9c1907ffdfba4ececa619c7
MD5 71d6754854e904e634a2dec8a7c4aef4
BLAKE2b-256 5b149c87190a7ec8496d38ca651119f0b6736bff5d858a53c7fe4e38773dc666

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl:

Publisher: release.yml on tomerwave/godharness

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

File details

Details for the file godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-macosx_10_12_x86_64.whl.

File metadata

File hashes

Hashes for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-macosx_10_12_x86_64.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 72432f3ae29f04801a8828a76380997efe6642e7be17f87992989923aa33beb6
MD5 969cfe11ed1db0bff0a3d43647b18d2c
BLAKE2b-256 596291004c83964fbc45128f7a9aae65e09379c005d7b69de902a9ca423cc8e2

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for godharness-0.1.6-py3-none-macosx_10_12_x86_64.whl:

Publisher: release.yml on tomerwave/godharness

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

0.1.7

7 files

This release

0.1.6 This release

7 files

0.1.5

7 files

0.1.4

7 files

0.1.3

7 files

0.1.2

7 files

0.1.1

7 files

0.1.0

7 files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page