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Harnesses & adapters

A harness is a target AI coding agent. Each one loads skills from its own path with its own schema. adept sync renders every canonical skill into every enabled harness, and adept sync-from adopts harness-side edits back into canonical.

Enable and inspect harnesses:

adept harness add claude-code     # enable a harness
adept harness remove cursor       # disable a harness
adept harness list                # registered harnesses + enabled state

Enabled harness ids are recorded in .adeptability/config.json under harnesses[].

Specialized renderers

Five harnesses ship dedicated renderers that get the details right — correct frontmatter, activation translation, sidecar handling, and size budgets:

Harness id Output
Claude Code claude-code .claude/skills/<id>/SKILL.md (full sidecars, allowed-tools)
Cursor cursor .cursor/rules/<id>.mdc (activation → alwaysApply/globs/description)
OpenCode opencode .opencode/skill/<id>/SKILL.md (full sidecars)
Codex codex AGENTS.md (aggregated, 32 KiB cap, lowest-priority dropped first)
GitHub Copilot copilot .github/instructions/<bucket>.instructions.md (aggregated per-glob)

See the Harness Comparison for exactly what each renderer emits and why it differs.

Generic per-skill adapters

Beyond the five specialized renderers, adept ships built-in generic per-skill adapters for 50+ more agents — each writing SKILL.md into that agent's convention. A sample:

amp, cline, continue, gemini-cli, github-copilot (agent-skills mode), goose, junie, kilo, openhands, qwen-code, roo, warp, windsurf, zencoder, and many more that write into a shared .agents/skills/<id>/SKILL.md.

Run adept harness list for the authoritative, live registry — it always reflects the version you have installed.

Config-driven adapters (no recompile)

You can teach adept about a new harness by dropping a YAML adapter file into $ADEPT_LIBRARY/adapters/ (or a library's adapters/ dir). It's loaded at startup. Example:

id: jetbrains-junie
name: JetBrains Junie
kind: per-skill
output: ".junie/guidelines/{id}.md"
needs-directory: false
size-budget-bytes: 0

frontmatter:
  include:
    - description
    - tags
  rename:
    description: summary

body:
  prefix: |
    > Auto-generated by adeptability. Do not edit by hand.

detect:
  - ".junie/"
  - ".junie/guidelines/"

Adapter files are validated against an embedded schema on load. Key fields:

  • kind — per-skill (one file per skill), aggregator-single, or aggregator-per-glob.
  • output — the on-disk path template; {id} expands to the skill id.
  • frontmatter.include / frontmatter.rename — which canonical fields to emit, and any key renames.
  • body.prefix / body.suffix / body.replace — body transforms (with {{.Project.Name}} templating).
  • detect — path globs used to auto-adopt existing files on adept init.
  • import.rename — optional reverse-render hints; the default sync-from flow auto-derives the inverse of frontmatter.rename, so this is only needed for non-bijective renames.

See examples/adapters/jetbrains-junie.yaml in the repo for the fully annotated version.