[dancingteeth]

Harness² ideas, part 1 of 2: prompt-rules. This is split out so it can land on its own. Part 2 (lessons-file + stall-probes) is stacked on this branch.

What's in it

• Frozen loop bundles for all three Harness² ideas (.cursor/loops/{lessons-file,prompt-rules,stall-probes}). The judge follows the worker runtime, and the loops run on the Cursor runtime.
• prompt-rules (feat(loop)):
  • a ## Facts block in the stable prompt head, with the verifier command exactly as configured and the deliverables;
  • optional deliverables / deliverableNudges (0–5, default 2). If deliverables are missing or empty, the harness re-prompts the worker before verify;
  • a plain-text tool-call warning in the volatile tail when the previous worker reply wrote tool calls as text;
  • safety rule 7.
• Fixes:
  • Worker faults during deliverable nudges go through the same fault path as the primary worker call (handleWorkerFault): transient classification, escalation and parking, with no livelock.
  • deliverables must be repo-relative. Absolute and .. paths are rejected.
  • The ## Facts / ## Workspace (git) headings always start on their own line after a blank line. With no Facts, the head is byte-identical to main.
  • doctor test: the Telegram env reset is scoped to the one test that needs it (the suite was failing under Doppler).
  • Cursor runtime: a Connect-node http/2 stream closed with error code CANCEL rejection is now treated as a detached HTTP/2 transport error, so the process no longer crashes on an unhandled rejection. This crashed a stall-probes loop run.

Gates (clean committed tree, 4209773)

• bash .cursor/loops/prompt-rules/verify.sh: exit 0, all steps 0–9, including step 8 (loopStagnationPolicy.ts / loopAgentEscalation.ts unchanged).
• pnpm build, pnpm typecheck: pass.
• pnpm test: 134 files, 1211 tests passed, plus the node test scripts.

No version bump. stallProbes and lessons aren't in this PR.

[dancingteeth]

Reviewey Ray sensor: #46 (Harness² 1/2, prompt-rules)

Risk

MEDIUM

What could go wrong?

• Every consumer's worker prompt changes. verify is required, so the new ## Facts block is always present, and the provider prefix cache misses once after upgrading. The comment says "with none set, the head is byte-identical", but that case can't happen in a real config.
• If a deliverable nudge faults, the iteration ends through handleWorkerFault. The primary worker's output from that iteration is never verified, and its transcript events and tool-error stats are dropped, because workerRuns is never pushed to transcriptEvents on that path.
• The HTTP/2 CANCEL regex now classifies Connect-node stream cancels as transport errors, so they get retried or backoff instead of crashing. A cancel that the user started would also match, but in the loop that only costs a retry.

Review depth

• Journeys at risk: agent-loop run worker prompt and nudge path; transient-fault classification.
• Line-by-line: agentLoop.ts (handleWorkerFault extraction, iterationLoop label, nudge loop), loopDeliverables.ts, loopConfig.ts refine, loopPrompt.ts Facts/tail, loopToolCallText.ts, errorFormat.ts, loopSafetyRules.ts, CHANGELOG/README.
• Empirical checks: on a fresh clone at head, in a worktree off origin. pnpm install --frozen-lockfile, then pnpm build passed. pnpm test gave 134 files, 1210 passed and 1 skipped (1211). bash .cursor/loops/prompt-rules/verify.sh exited 0 with steps 0–9, including step 8. The tree was clean afterwards. CI test (22) is success on this head.
• Reversibility: easy
• Verification gap: covered
• Release guardrails: draft; ships in 0.8.3 together with fix: lazy-load optional runtime SDK peers (0.8.3) #44/Harness: sidecar verify, usage split, judge resilience, tool errors #45 (per Paul in chat). No version bump in the PR, which is correct.
• Change set: base 9f317f4 (main) → head 4209773
• Overlay (REVIEWS.md): tier "loop harness src" = MEDIUM. Gating impacts are data-loss | security-boundary | false-closure | cross-dispatch | verify-bypass, and none applies. Deliverable paths are confined: the schema refine, plus missingDeliverables re-checking resolvesInside, which only stats.
• Agent-authored (Pass 2): the frozen acceptance spec sha is pinned and checked by verify step 1. Tests for nudge faults, path confinement and the Facts heading are present and pass.

Verdict

ADVISORY

Advisory

• CHANGELOG Unreleased covers only deliverables. It should also list the ## Facts stable-head block, the plain-text tool-call warning plus safety rule 7, and the Connect-node http/2 stream closed with error code CANCEL transport fix. Those are user-visible prompt and runtime changes in 0.8.3.
• Nudge-fault path drops primary-run telemetry. On continue iterationLoop from a nudge fault, push workerRuns' transcript events before continuing so the transcript and tool-error stats aren't lost.

Nits

• ## Facts wraps the verifier in single backticks. A verify command that contains a backtick renders broken. Use a fenced block or a longer backtick run.
• previousWorkerPlainTextToolCalls keeps its old value across a worker-fault iteration. That's harmless, but consider resetting it.
• missingDeliverables uses statSync, which follows symlinks. A deliverable that is a symlink to an out-of-repo file counts as present. It's read-only, so this is a nit.

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