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.

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.