Update Installed Harness

How to refresh an installed harness

Note

Goal: Pull a newer harness version into a project that already has an older one installed, without clobbering user edits. Prereqs: The harness repo is cloned somewhere on your machine; the target project was installed from some prior version.

install.sh --update (POSIX) and install.ps1 -Update (Windows) refresh harness-authored files in place without touching user-authored ones.

Steps

1. Pull the latest harness:

   git -C /path/to/agentic-harness pull

2. Run the installer against your project with --update:

   /path/to/agentic-harness/install.sh --update /path/to/your-project

   Or on Windows:

   pwsh -NoProfile -File C:\path\to\agentic-harness\install.ps1 -Update C:\path\to\your-project

3. Confirm the recorded version matches:

   cat /path/to/your-project/.harness/.version

What gets touched

File	Owner	Touched by --update?
PLAN.md, progress.md, features.json, init.sh, verify.{sh,ps1}, known-migrations.md	User	No
AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md	User	No
wiki/ scaffold	User	Per-file walk — missing files filled in, existing files preserved
.harness/scripts/, .harness/hooks/	Harness	Yes (overwritten)
.claude/, .agent/, .agents/, .codex/, .gemini/	Harness	Yes (overwritten)
.github/workflows/wiki-sync.yml	Harness	Yes (overwritten)
.harness/.version	Harness	Written after a successful update (so future runs can show a delta)

Verify

Running a second --update back-to-back should be a no-op — the installer is idempotent.

When in doubt about ownership, see the cp_managed function in install.sh. "Managed" files are harness-authored and overwritten on --update; anything not wrapped in cp_managed is user-authored and preserved.

See Installer CLI reference for all flags. See ADR 0002 for why the boundary exists.