Orion's Belt
Preamble
Orion’s Belt is Harness: the concrete control plane where the agent system is strapped to tasks, skills, state, runtime evidence, eval paths, and recovery rails.
The Harness Makes The Myth Physical
Orion can stay abstract forever unless something holds the run. Orion’s Belt is the place where the operating model touches files: work item contracts, manifests, evals, skill cards, mode state, runtime logs, adapters, runbooks, and the OMX fork that supplies the first rails.
The implementation alias is Harness because that is what this layer does. It straps the agent system to a baseline, an ideal state, and an eval path before the run is allowed to call itself progress.
Rails Before Autonomy
The Harness contract is plain: every non-trivial change names the current behavior, the desired behavior, and the evidence path. Runtime state is evidence. Project-local docs are doctrine only after promotion through an eval, ADR, evolution record, or runbook.
Without those records, Orion drifts into mythology. A workflow can sound autonomous while relying on chat memory, missing state, stale prompts, and handoffs that no cold-start agent can verify.
The Tool Can Become The Work
Building a harness for agents before the agents have proved enough work worth harnessing creates more surface area, more ceremony, and more places to maintain the feeling of control.
Orion’s Belt earns its cost when it reduces rework. A cold-start agent must be able to read the local artifacts and know what changed, the reason for the change, how it was tested, and which future surface inherits the lesson.
The required shape is a thin core with an evolving edge. The core protects state, gates, and run contracts. The edge lets skills, adapters, and domain workflows evolve after evidence.
The First Real Proof
This surface has the strongest evidence in Orion today: project-local Harness docs, work item contract, capability registry, eval structure, runtime state, and the OMX fork lab. The current proof is still local. The larger Orion proof arrives when Harness rails cause a later agent run to route better, stop earlier, hand off cleaner, or promote a lesson without relying on the operator to remember the story.