spice-harness 0.21.0

Simultaneous Production, Integration, and Control Environment: an agent harness for coding repositories.

spice

Simultaneous Production, Integration, and Control Environment.

spice is an installed, repo-native harness for operating coding agents. It treats the agent transcript as the source of truth and the repository filesystem as the steering channel; supervision, task routing, git pressure, live feedback, and hygiene gates are derived from those two surfaces.

It is built for agents moving fast in parallel: every correction is durable, every task boundary is observable, and the gate catches structural drift before it lands.

spice is building itself, but it was not created in a vacuum: the loop was born from a harsher polyglot environment where many languages, conventions, and agent lanes had to survive contact with one another.

_{Operator steering arrives in the live stream; an assistant ACK retires the exact inbox key from the durable filesystem queue.}

What it does

• Semantic ACKs: steering is not considered handled until the agent acknowledges the durable key in assistant prose.
• Task allocation: spice task next owns work selection; task boundaries own git synchronization and review phases.
• Conscience: curated maxims judge assistant prose while work is still in flight, then route violations back as ordinary steering.
• Constitution: pre-commit and spice study ... enforce repository shape, file/routine limits, env policy, reachability, assertion density, private internals, and commit-message rules.
• Serve UI: spice serve exposes lanes, teams, live transcripts, steering, attachments, task routing, and browser-visible diagnostics.

See docs/overview.md for the operating model and docs/interface.md for the serve UI.

Commands

Surface	Command
Prepare a repo	spice init / spice doctor
Run through the agent wrapper	spice agent run -- <cmd>
Maintain a worktree-bound agent	spice agent ensure / spice agent supervise
Pull allocator work	spice task next
Rehydrate context	spice session briefing
Open the operator UI	spice serve
Run studies and gates	spice study ... / git pre-commit hook

Configuration lives in CONFIG.md. The design contract lives in DESIGN.md. Wrapper command behavior is detailed in docs/cli/wrapper-commands.md. Stability expectations for extensions and command coupling live in STABILITY.md.

Install

uv tool install -e /path/to/spice-main
# or, for the released package:
uv tool install spice-harness

cd /path/to/your/repo
spice init
spice doctor

The default install is a uv tool. Operators who deploy from a main tree should use the editable form so the installed spice command resolves to that tree; that editable main tree is the server deployment. Other worktrees remain operated trees and do not supply their own runtime.

Graceful degradation

RTK, the local judge, and speech synthesis are optional companions. When they are unavailable, spice keeps the transcript, steering, task board, and constitution working; only compaction, maxim feedback, or audio narration degrade. Runtime and configuration details are in CONFIG.md.

Release

Release workflow is documented in docs/release.md. Most users only need to know that releases are cut from clean synchronized worktrees through the repository's mounted spice release command.

Status

Work in progress toward a standalone, releasable product. The loop described here is real, exercised daily, and guarded by the same constitution that spice init installs elsewhere.