What the harness has cost#

bash

specgate harness report            # everything recorded
specgate harness report --last 5   # the five most recent runs

Every run writes .harness/runs/<timestamp>.json, and the report reads them:

text

  📈 harness report  (12 run(s))

    requirements attempted    31
    passed                    24
    failed                     5
    blocked                    2

    first attempt worked      67%  (16 of 24 passes)
    cost per delivered REQ    4m 12s  wall-clock, failed attempts included

Two numbers, chosen because they decide things. "First attempt worked" says whether the retry ladder is buying anything or spending three times as much on the same mistake. "Cost per delivered requirement" divides all the time — including the attempts that failed — by the requirements that actually landed, because that is what delivery costs.

Wall-clock, not tokens: an agent is any shell command, and only the agent knows what it spent. Recording a number the harness cannot observe would be worse than recording none.

The ledger is local. .harness/runs/ ignores itself, for two reasons: the harness refuses to start on a dirty tree, so a ledger git could see would mean the first run makes the second one refuse; and a file every run rewrites is a merge conflict waiting to happen. The agent command is never recorded — it is the kind of string that carries an API key.

What the harness has cost#

Next#