Fulcrum 5 of 18
Before the agent rebuilds from scratch what is already known
When the agent needs to understand something (a system, a past decision, a preference) and is about to work it out from the code or from its own guess.
What goes wrong here
The agent works out from the code alone something that is already on record: why a thing is the way it is, what was tried, what the person decided last week. It guesses the intent behind the code and treats the guess as fact.
How it compounds if nothing catches it
A guessed 'why' licenses confident changes. The agent deletes 'unused' scaffolding that was really the next feature, re-opens a settled decision, or re-asks a question the person already answered. Each move looks reasonable on its own, and each costs the person a correction.
What the harness does here
The harness puts the person's accumulated record within reach. agent_find (explained in the agentic-find skill) is one search across past sessions, session summaries, recorded intents, commits and notes. The message hook already runs it on every message. A separate gate is meant to block the first code search of a session until the agent has searched that record. It is registered, but at the time of writing it is waiting on a validation flag and lets searches through. Oracles answer questions such as 'which principles apply here' (infuse, insight, oracles). An oracle is a Google NotebookLM notebook loaded with the person's own history, which the agent queries the way it would ask a colleague who remembers. Research reports from earlier subagents are cached and can be retrieved (agentic-artifact-cache). track tells an agent to check whether a sweep has already been done before repeating it. This is one mechanism at one fulcrum among many. It is not the harness's single cause.
The pieces that act here
- /agentic-find
Explain how institutional memory search works and how to fall back when it isn't set up. Use when asked how to query past decisions, intents, or accumulated project knowledge.
- user-prompt-enrich.sh
A hook: a script Claude Code runs on its own at a set moment.
- pre-tool-intent-search-gate.sh
A hook: a script Claude Code runs on its own at a set moment.
- post-tool-detect-agent-find.sh
A hook: a script Claude Code runs on its own at a set moment.
- /insight
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- /oracles
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- /infuse
Query the Operating Mind — an institutional knowledge oracle built from your own past agent sessions, if you've set one up (see /alignment-harness:harness-setup). Use when you need to know what has been learned about any domain before acting, when starting work in an unfamiliar area, when making decisions that could conflict with established principles, or when the person you're working with says "/infuse". Returns grounded, cited answers from your own principles vault — or says plainly that none is set up yet.
- /agentic-artifact-cache
Read cached research and plan output from past sessions (your own, or a subagent's) instead of re-doing the work. Use when you need something a past session or subagent already figured out, and whenever a memory search returns an artifact_id.
- /track
Use when performing any multi-step audit, triage, or alignment task where future agents may repeat the same work.