odysseus/website/original-harness-capability-policy.md

Original Harness Capability Policy

Odysseus Original is the canonical product and the only agent orchestrator. Specialized runners are evidence sources, not merge targets.

Architecture

The supported shape is:

1. One Original agent loop owns prompting, tool selection, policy, evidence, recovery, compaction, and completion.
2. Capability contracts describe what the current environment can do.
3. Execution bridges or MCP servers perform work in the owning environment.
4. Personal tools remain available in interactive sessions but are excluded from external terminal contracts unless explicitly provided.

Capability Decisions

Capability	Decision	Canonical form
Workspace execution	Keep	Request-scoped AgentExecutionBridge, moving toward a Workspace MCP boundary
File mutation	Keep	write_file, edit_file, and apply_patch with evidence recording
Process recovery	Keep	Bounded polling, timeout, exit status, and stale-process recovery behind the execution contract
Repeated-action recovery	Keep	Detect identical calls, unchanged successful results, and failed batches separately
Completion	Keep	Required artifacts and executable verifier evidence; no evaluator-specific shortcuts
Context control	Keep	Deterministic compaction with retained user evidence and bounded tool output
Search	Keep	Existing private SearXNG path
Browser interaction	Keep	Existing private browser for rendered pages, sessions, clicks, and screenshots
Personal tools	Keep, isolated	Separate personal capability surface; never substitute editor documents for workspace files
Tool discovery	Keep	Existing tool RAG and capability-aware selection
Media ingress	Keep	Bounded image, audio, video-frame, and document ingestion with hashes and trace metadata
Visual verification	Candidate	Generic source grounding and rendered-artifact checks, gated by available media capabilities
Document access	Candidate	Structured PDF and Office extraction through read_file or a Workspace MCP implementation
Skills	Keep, generic only	Procedures for artifact completion, recovery, verification, development, media evidence, and research

Rejected Merges

Do not merge:

• another agent loop, submit controller, or conversation state machine;
• category names, task identifiers, fixed workspace paths, expected answers, grader behavior, scoring rules, or evaluator prompts;
• per-category turn thresholds or phase transitions;
• terminal multiplexer control when the environment already exposes direct process execution;
• repeated prompt guards that do not add new executable evidence;
• browser or search replacements for capabilities Original already owns.

Merge Gate

A mechanism may enter Original only when all of these are true:

1. It is useful outside the evaluation that revealed it.
2. It is selected by an environment capability, not a task name or path.
3. It fits inside the Original loop or behind an execution boundary.
4. Its success or failure produces traceable evidence.
5. It has focused regressions and a representative held-out run.
6. It removes or contains complexity instead of adding an overlapping mode.

Current Priority

The next capability work is reliable structured document access. Failed binary-file inspections must remain failures; they must not be interpreted as unchanged evidence or trigger early artifact synthesis. Once grounding is reliable, add generic rendered-artifact verification without importing any specialized task phases.