North

North is the harness that Socrates, Tom's agent workforce, runs on. Claude Code and Codex are the base harnesses; North adds what a workforce needs on top: staffing and routing of workers, a safe landing path to main, hooks that guard each tool call, shared skills and the policy checks that keep them honest. It also ships north, a terminal fleet screen for directing sessions and decisions.

It is built for Tom and the agents in Socrates. Anyone who directs coding agents can read it, try the north app, or borrow a command, hook or skill. The full harness expects Tom's machines and his private policy repository, South, so it does not install elsewhere as is.

The words follow docs/terms.md: a model is the weights, the harness turns a model into an agent, and a workforce is many agents with roles, staffing and policy. A model is never called an agent.

Try it

You need Nix with flakes to build North. Install and sign in to a provider CLI to launch sessions for that provider.

git clone https://github.com/tompassarelli/north && cd north
nix develop -c cargo build --locked
target/debug/north

How the harness is installed on Tom's machines, how a worker is staffed, where policy lives and how a change lands: docs/harness.md.

Where things live

• src/: the north fleet runtime, terminal screen and authorized host effects.
• bin/: every harness command (agents, threads, safe-push, worker-ledger and more).
• harness/: hooks, skills, defaults and policy owners.
• agent-machinery/: provider-independent doctrine, contracts and skills.
• docs/: the documents below.

Read next

Each document has one job:

• docs/harness.md: install, staffing, policy and landing, end to end.
• docs/terms.md: the four layer terms.
• docs/architecture.md: the north app's owning boundaries.
• docs/features.md: what each command does.
• docs/feedback-loop.md: each recorded signal, its writer and its reader.
• docs/references.md: outside sources, what they shaped and what came of them.
• docs/rationale/targets.md: why numeric targets gate or not.
• AGENTS.md: rules for agents working in this repository, including build and check commands.
• agent-machinery/README.md: the shared procedures package.
• agent-machinery/skills/verification/SKILL.md: how tests are kept and run.