The Manual How the harness of harnesses actually works.
deadreckon supervises the coding agent you already use. This is the
guided tour of the machine underneath: fourteen chapters, each built
around a diagram and mapped to the real
as-built architecture . Read it in order, or jump to a part of the map.
01 The harness of harnesses deadreckon does not replace your coding agent — it wraps the agent CLI you already trust and supervises the loop around it. §1 02 Two layers: judgment and enforcement A Markdown skill makes the judgment calls; a Rust binary enforces the invariants. Neither reaches into the other. §2 §3 03 The run lifecycle Every run walks a seven-phase machine — init, plan, provider, sandbox, execute, verify, complete — and only one path reaches "done". §4 §6 04 The turn loop Inside execute, the model takes turns: ask for a tool, run it, repeat. It stops when it stops asking — and that is only an opinion until the gate checks it. §9 05 The gate: done you can't fake A separate process, dr-gate, holds a secret the agent cannot read and signs acceptance with it. No valid signature, no "completed". §13 §35 06 Done, written in English You describe success in plain language; deadreckon compiles it into executable checks the watchdog runs every time. §13 07 Isolation & the sandbox Your checkout is never touched. Work happens in an isolated worktree, inside a platform-native sandbox. §11 §24 08 Durable state & crash recovery Every turn is written to disk before anything else happens. Close the laptop, lose the network, kill the model — then attach and resume. §4 §7 §15 09 Atomic promotion & the library An accepted run is swapped into the library in one atomic rename — crash-safe at every step between working and done. §8 10 Providers & bring-your-own-key Route a turn through a subscription CLI, a direct API key, or a keyless smoke provider. deadreckon owns the boundary, not the intelligence. §10 §16 §19 11 Multi-agent: orchestrate & campaign Add a fresh reviewer, split a goal into merged child runs, or fan one goal out to many gated orchestrators and compose the results. §30 §36 12 Evidence, not a transcript Each accepted run promotes to a review packet you read like a pull request: what changed, why, which call touched which file, and what it cost. §14 §25 13 Watching it work Attach from any terminal for a live TUI, a rolling narration, and a flight recorder that lets you rewind to any checkpoint. §18 §27 §32 §33 14 The filesystem & the receipts Everything lives in plain files under ~/.deadreckon — run state, spend, traces, provenance, events — auditable on disk, not scrolled in a chat. §5 §14 