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Rigger

A declarative Python framework for building external harnesses around opaque coding agents.

Rigger lets you compose protocol-based plugins across 6 orthogonal dimensions — task decomposition, context provisioning, verification, constraints, state continuity, and entropy management — to build structured harnesses that wrap any coding agent. The agent is a black box; Rigger manages everything external to it.

Features

  • Declarative YAML config — Define your harness in harness.yaml, run with rigger. No Python required.
  • 22 built-in components — Ready-to-use implementations across all 6 dimensions
  • 6 dimension protocols — Each aspect of harness behavior is a separate typing.Protocol that you implement and plug in
  • CLI — rigger run, rigger init, rigger status for zero-code workflows
  • Templates — Start from pre-built templates (gsd, openai) or create your own
  • Plugin discovery — Third-party components auto-discovered via importlib.metadata entry points
  • Canonical epoch loop — Harness.run() orchestrates the full lifecycle, or use step methods for custom loops
  • Async-native — Built on asyncio for concurrent dispatch and long-running agent calls
  • Parallel dispatch — Run multiple agents in isolated workspaces with GitWorktreeManager, IndependentDirManager, or IndependentBranchManager
  • .harness/ bilateral protocol — Versioned filesystem contract between harness and backend with atomic read/write

Quick Start

pip install rigger
rigger init

This generates a harness.yaml — edit it to configure your harness:

backend:
  type: claude_code

task_source:
  type: file_list
  path: tasks.txt

verifiers:
  - type: test_suite
    command: ["python", "-m", "pytest", "--tb=short", "-q"]

run:
  max_epochs: 20
  max_retries: 2
  stop_when: all_tasks_done

Then run:

rigger

Templates

Start from a pre-built template instead:

rigger init --template gsd        # minimal get-shit-done config
rigger init --template openai     # multi-agent OpenAI-style harness
rigger init --list-templates      # see all available templates

Next Steps