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MIF Research Harness

Explanation: architecture

Explanation: architecture

Section titled “Explanation: architecture”

One repository, four layers

Section titled “One repository, four layers”

The defining defect of the prior system was that the capability was split across two repositories that had to be assembled by hand: the engine (a Claude Code plugin) and the harness layer (a corpus repo). Neither alone was a research harness (design spec §1, §3 L1).

The template unifies both halves. The boundary between engine and harness services is a module boundary inside one repo, not a repo boundary (§6a). The four layers — engine, contracts, harness services, outputs — all ship on clone.

MIF is the spine

Section titled “MIF is the spine”

There is one authoritative interchange format for findings and the knowledge graph: MIF (§6c). A finding is a MIF memory unit; the knowledge graph is MIF EntityReferences and typed relationships; citations are MIF Citation objects; provenance is the MIF W3C-PROV block. This collapses the prior schema drift into one machine-validated contract and makes the graph first-class instead of tag-derived.

Where the harness needs a pattern MIF core does not carry (the falsification lifecycle, quarantine state, session lineage), it closes the gap locally as a harness-owned MIF extension under extensions.harness — never by forking MIF (§8b).

Packs are the only extension surface

Section titled “Packs are the only extension surface”

The core researches anything. Every optional domain, deliverable genre, render channel, and vocabulary arrives as a pack, and a pack is a Claude Code plugin (§7b). The core hardwires none of them; harness.config.json packs[] is the control plane that enables or disables each one and can ingest external/private plugins. Packs compose with the core, never patch it.

Enforcement travels with the engine

Section titled “Enforcement travels with the engine”

The quality gates are bundled hooks under .claude/hooks/, wired in .claude/settings.json: the markdown anti-evasion guard (md_guard.py, which never suppresses a diagnostic), the research-pipeline reminder, and the citation-leak gate for published outputs. Because they ship with the template, the gates are portable on clone — the prior system left them corpus-side, so they did not travel with the tool (§3 L7).