Openharness Daily: The Great Host-Install Untangling
A three-day push to let harnesses and tools install directly on a host — without a sandbox — surfaced a deeper bug in how the CLI resolves its own state directories, forcing two follow-up fixes before the feature could ship safely.
Duration: PT2M24S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Openharness Daily.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Openharness Daily
- Published: 2026-09-16T12:00:47Z
- Audio duration: PT2M24S
Transcript excerpt
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Good morning. It's September 16th, 2026, and today's briefing is about one feature that took three tries to get right.
The headline: host installation for `agro harness` and `agro tool` is now real. PR #1071 removed the old refusal that blocked any install when no sandbox was running, giving operators on a fresh host a path to set up a harness before a sandbox exists. It brought uninstall along for the ride, with receipts recorded…
But shipping that feature exposed a second, more serious problem: state-directory confusion. The harness root and host config were being resolved through a compatibility function that guesses between a legacy `~/.oh` directory and the newer `~/.agro`. On any machine carrying that legacy registry, the guess pointed…
That still wasn't the end of it. PR #1073, merged just before this recording, found that the workspace clone itself could sit right at the state-home root and collide with the control directory — the exact bug reported in the original issue thread, where every command from the home directory failed with a conflict…
The through-line here: introducing a new capability — host installs — meant confronting years of ambiguity in how this CLI decides…
On…