Skip to content

FUTURE-HARNESSES.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
106 lines (78 loc) · 4.27 KB

FUTURE-HARNESSES.md

File metadata and controls

106 lines (78 loc) · 4.27 KB
title Future harness notes
summary Notes on what the Coven adapter seam must preserve before adding Hermes, Aider, Cline, Gemini CLI, or other future harness integrations.
read_when
Checking why a harness is not supported yet
Planning adapter research after Codex and Claude Code
description Notes on what the Coven adapter seam must preserve before adding Hermes, Aider, Cline, Gemini CLI, or other future harness integrations.

Future harness notes

Coven v0 intentionally supports only the Codex and Claude Code default adapters. This note records what the adapter seam must preserve before adding additional external harness adapters such as Hermes.

OpenClaw is the first external integration boundary, not a daemon-launched harness target. OpenClaw integration is externalized through the @opencoven/coven plugin, which acts as a socket client for the Rust daemon. See OpenClaw bridge.

Current adapter contract

A Coven harness adapter resolves to:

  • a stable Coven harness id, such as codex or claude;
  • a user-facing label for coven doctor;
  • an executable name to detect on PATH;
  • optional fixed arguments that must come before the prompt; and
  • the prompt as the final command argument.

This keeps the runtime generic enough for CLIs that are not shaped exactly like Codex or Claude Code, without adding unsupported harnesses prematurely.

Hermes observations

Hermes should stay a phase-2 validation target until CastCodes and Coven have more direct Codex/Claude usage.

Observed public CLI surface:

  • Interactive session: hermes
  • TUI mode: hermes --tui
  • One-shot prompt: hermes chat -q "..."
  • Programmatic output mode: hermes chat --quiet -q "..."
  • Model/provider overrides: hermes chat --model ..., hermes chat --provider ...
  • Resume options: --resume <session> and --continue [name]
  • Worktree mode: --worktree
  • Approval bypass: --yolo

Sources:

Implications for Coven

A Hermes adapter probably should not be a direct copy of the Codex/Claude shape. It likely needs one of these modes:

  1. One-shot logged session using hermes chat --quiet -q <prompt>.
    • Good for captured output and exit events.
    • Less useful for long-lived attach/input because the process may exit after the answer.
  2. Interactive PTY session using hermes or hermes --tui.
    • Better for human-visible attach/intervention.
    • Requires testing whether initial prompt injection through argv is possible or whether Coven must write the prompt to stdin after spawn.
  3. Resume-aware session using --resume / --continue.
    • Potentially useful once Coven has a first-class upstream session id field.
    • Should not be added until Coven's own session identity model is stable.

Decision

Do not add Hermes to coven doctor or coven run yet.

For now, keep the adapter seam able to express prefix-arg CLIs (chat -q <prompt>) and revisit the actual Hermes adapter as an external adapter after:

  • direct Coven Codex/Claude sessions have been used more;
  • CastCodes-facing attach/open or lane replay has had real usage;
  • we know whether Hermes should be one-shot, interactive, or resume-aware inside Coven; and
  • we can test against a real Hermes install.

Candidate harness landscape

flowchart LR
  subgraph V0["v0 (supported today)"]
    Codex["codex\n@openai/codex"]
    Claude["claude\n@anthropic-ai/claude-code"]
  end

  subgraph Research["Phase 1: research"]
    Hermes["hermes\n(NousResearch)"]
    Aider["aider"]
    Gemini["gemini-cli\n(Google)"]
    Cline["cline"]
  end

  subgraph Later["Later: revisit"]
    OpenCode["opencode"]
    Custom["user-defined custom adapter"]
  end

  subgraph Clients["External clients"]
    OpenClaw["OpenClaw\n@opencoven/coven bridge"]
  end

  V0 --> Research
  Research --> Later
  OpenClaw --> V0

  style Codex fill:#9A8ECD,stroke:#D4B5FF,color:#1A1825
  style Claude fill:#9A8ECD,stroke:#D4B5FF,color:#1A1825
Loading

A candidate moves from Phase 1: research to public v0 support only after clearing every stage in the Harness adapters maturity checklist. The grid above is directional, not a promise.