Long Task With Harness

The harness is for tasks that won’t fit in a single model context window. It makes progress durable by combining:

• A workspace directory with durable artifacts (features.json, rexos-progress.md, init scripts)
• A verification script (init.sh on Unix, init.ps1 on Windows)
• Git commits as checkpoints
• A session id that persists per-workspace

1) Create a workspace

mkdir -p /tmp/rexos-task

2) Initialize the harness

Without a prompt, this only creates the durable artifacts + the initial git commit:

rexos harness init /tmp/rexos-task

With a prompt, RexOS runs an “initializer agent” to populate features.json and adjust the init script:

rexos harness init /tmp/rexos-task --prompt "Create a small CLI in this workspace that prints Hello and has a passing test suite"

3) Run an incremental session

rexos harness run /tmp/rexos-task --prompt "Implement the next failing feature"

The harness will:

1. Run preflight (show recent commits, progress tail, next failing feature)
2. Run the agent for this session
3. Run the workspace init script
4. If it fails, feed the failure back and retry (up to --max-attempts)
5. If it passes, checkpoint commit any changes

4) Repeat until done

rexos harness run /tmp/rexos-task --prompt "Continue"

Where state lives

• Workspace: your code + features.json + rexos-progress.md + init scripts + git history
• Memory: ~/.rexos/rexos.db (sessions/messages + small KV store)