| FMRS | 40 / 100 · D | 79 / 100 · B |
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| Reliability | 6 / 20 | 12 / 20 |
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| Security and permissions | 7 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Maintenance | 9 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Documentation | 11 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Setup experience | 7 / 20 | 15 / 20 |
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| Best for | - Teams that need enforced process control and an auditable journal
- Users working across multiple AI coding harnesses who want one process definition
- Complex agentic workflows that must be replayable, resumable, and gated by humans
- Engineering teams that want headless orchestration in CI/CD without an external AI agent
| - Developers auditing NPM dependencies within AI workflows
- Teams performing supply chain security assessments
- Users of Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code
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| Not for | - Users who only need one-off chat or single-step code generation
- Environments where installing Node.js or running external CLIs is not possible
- Teams wanting fully autonomous automation that cannot tolerate mandatory stops and approvals
- Users who want to consume the kip-sdk package from npm (it is private/0.0.1, unpublished)
| - Projects outside the NPM ecosystem (e.g., pure Python/Go)
- Environments without network access to deps.dev, OSV.dev, and the npm registry
- Scenarios requiring maintenance by an official upstream vendor
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| Required permissions | - Write access to the run state directory (default ~/.a5c/runs/, with repo-local .a5c/runs/ compatibility reads)
- Create or modify files in the project directory, as determined by the process code being run
- Perform anything an AI agent can do inside a process, including installing npm packages, generating CI/CD configuration, and setting up git hooks
- Invoke discovered harness CLIs and external commands during process execution
- Read and modify .a5c/compression.config.json to configure compression layers
| - Network access to the NPM registry and external services (deps.dev, OSV.dev, OpenSSF, npms.io, GitHub)
- Read access to workspace lockfiles (pnpm-lock.yaml, package-lock., yarn.lock) for cache invalidation
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| Risks and side effects | - Process code is the authority, so a poorly written process can cause unintended file changes or command execution
- Quality-gated processes may iterate repeatedly until gates pass, consuming significant tokens and time
- Plugin installation uses user scope, affecting all sessions for that user
- Blueprints can install npm packages, modify linter rules, and write CI configuration, so their instructions should be reviewed before approval
- The README states babysitter harness:install and harness:discover are deprecated, so older commands may stop working
| - Third-party READMEs and changelogs are untrusted external content; they are wrapped in tags with _meta flags but should still be handled cautiously
- Depends on availability and accuracy of external services
- Batch requests are capped at 25 packages to prevent registry enumeration; larger sets require batching
- Third-party open source project, not officially maintained by NPM or Anthropic
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| Supported clients | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot | Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor |
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| Tools | 0 | 19 |
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