Harness Knowledge

• Written knowledge, searched on demand

  People import guides, READMEs, ADRs, OpenAPI specs, Confluence exports, PDFs and meeting transcripts. Agents search them when they need to know how something works.

• Cited passages

  knowledge_search answers with pointers (title, section and snippet) or whole chunks, and knowledge_get reads a document or chunk with its neighbours.

• Hybrid search

  Keyword search (BM25) and vector search with the multilingual e5-small model, merged with reciprocal rank fusion. Without the embedder, search falls back to keywords.

• Heading-aware chunks

  Markdown, text, HTML and Confluence exports, OpenAPI, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, PDFs with a text layer and VTT or SRT transcripts, each split along its own sections.

• Linked to repositories

  A document can link to repositories, narrowed to path globs. A search from inside a repository ranks its linked documents higher; an unlinked document is global.

• People approve what agents add

  knowledge_add only sends a proposal to a review queue. A person approving it in Harness Desktop, or with held approve, makes it searchable.

• Cheap re-imports

  Unchanged content changes nothing. Changed content updates the document in place and reuses the vectors of unchanged chunks.

• Team database

  Keep the index in MongoDB, PostgreSQL with pgvector or libSQL, and choose per kind of document whether it lives remote, on this computer or both.

• Claude Code

  Register with claude mcp add --scope user harness-knowledge -- harness-knowledge mcp.

• Codex

  Register with codex mcp add harness-knowledge -- harness-knowledge mcp.

• OMP, PI, OpenCode

  Add a harness-knowledge entry that runs harness-knowledge mcp to their MCP config.

• Harness Desktop

  Installs it, registers the server for every harness and adds a Knowledge view for import, review and repository links.

• Any other MCP client

  Any MCP client can start the stdio server with harness-knowledge mcp.

1. # macOS and Linux

   $ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MSpiechowicz/harness-useful-knowledge/main/install.sh | sh

2. # Windows (PowerShell)

   PS> powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MSpiechowicz/harness-useful-knowledge/main/install.ps1 | iex"

Prefer a download? Every release and its notes are on the Harness Knowledge releases page.

• Local by default. The index lives in knowledge.sqlite3 in the harness-knowledge folder of your user data directory unless you point it at a team database.
• The embedder downloads its search model once from this project’s GitHub release, pinned by SHA-256 and size, and runs it on this computer.
• Document text is treated as untrusted data, never as instructions.
• Agents cannot write knowledge on their own. Every proposal waits in a review queue for a person.
• A team database is reached over TLS whenever it is not on this computer.

Harness Knowledge is the searchable project documentation in Harness Useful, a family of six open-source, local tools for coding-agent harnesses. Harness Desktop is the window, Harness Skills the workflow, Harness Memory the shared project memory, Harness Knowledge the searchable project documentation, Harness Code the code graph and Harness Dashboard the usage and cost meter.

Each tool works on its own. Harness Desktop’s Recommended setup can install the others after you confirm each part and register their MCP servers in each detected harness.

• Harness Desktop Your coding-agent CLI, in a native desktop window.
• Harness Skills From a natural-language request to reviewed, verified work.
• Harness Memory Project memory for your AI coding agents, in one local binary.
• Harness Code A code graph for your AI coding agents, in one local binary.
• Harness Dashboard Token usage across your AI coding tools, in one local app.

See the Harness Useful home page, every tool side by side or the family FAQ.