Strata is a skeleton for coding agents. Skills, hooks, commands, references; one CLAUDE.md as the spine. Harness is the composition primitive: cross-model adversarial generate-evaluate against frozen artifacts. The agent dispatches the thinking; you keep the synthesis.
bin/ symbolic model lanes (strong | fast | grader | breadth) + dispatch + init
skills/ procedural knowledge the agent loads on demand (spec, recon, harness, ...)
commands/ user-invoked slash commands (verify, review, end, best-of-n, commit)
agents/ subagent definitions (orchestrator, planner, quick-research, code-reviewer)
hooks/ event-driven scripts (PreToolUse, PostToolUse, SessionStart, ...)
reference/ long-form docs with a complete INDEX and per-doc Quick Navs
config/ model-map.toml (symbolic-lane bindings) + private-tokens.example.txt
telemetry/ opt-in delegation/cost telemetry (off by default; STRATA_TELEMETRY=1)
workspace/ runtime continuity (state/specs | state/handoffs)
CLAUDE.md at the repo root is the operating doctrine the agent reads first.
Reference docs use a pull model: the complete reference index lists every shipped doc, each doc carries a Quick Nav, and the agent's own intelligence decides what to read on demand.
git clone https://github.com/onblueroses/strata.git ~/.strata
~/.strata/bin/strata-init
strata-init writes a shell-rc block, creates the runtime workspace, and prompts you to fill config/model-map.toml with the strongest models you currently have access to. See SETUP.md for the walkthrough and MIGRATION.md after upgrading an existing install.
- Delegate. The orchestrator session dispatches code, reviews, and probes to lane wrappers (
bin/strong,bin/fast,bin/grader,bin/breadth). Your context stays free for synthesis. - Persist to files. Specs at
workspace/state/specs/survive context compaction. Sessions resume from>> Current Step; handoffs and post-compaction pointer maps carry the rest. - Session-aware. Edit receipts and compaction pointers use
$CLAUDE_SESSION_ID; specs record ownership so concurrent sessions can detect overlap. - Harness for hard problems.
/harnessgenerates N candidates, grades against a frozen rubric, iterates until aggregate PASS./best-of-nruns the same shape for design-space questions. - Telemetry is opt-in. Lane dispatches and session metrics emit nothing unless you
export STRATA_TELEMETRY=1. When enabled, enveloped JSONL lands under$STATE_DIR/telemetry(never the tracked tree);telemetry/ships only the scripts. See telemetry/README.md.
Strata ships the substrate, not a curated set of domain packs. Project-specific skills, vendor automations, and personal references live in separate repos. Adapt the kernel; bring your own packs.
The keep test is whether a skill teaches the agent how to work or teaches it a domain. The first stays; the second belongs somewhere else.
Instruction files rot against the model that reads them: enumeration quotas sized for a smaller context window, self-attestation compensating for old error rates, steps micro-scripted for a weaker reader. Strata's own bodies carry this. An audit of the 42 primary model-facing files on 2026-08-02 found 492 stale lines and 99 places a current capability goes unused, and most are unfixed.
Run skills/era-audit/ against this repository to see the current list, or against your own library to find its own. The audit reads your machine for what is true today rather than assuming the author's setup, because a rot detector with a frozen reference era rots too.
MIT
A few writing-craft skills under skills/ are adapted from Wondermonger-daydreaming/claude-skills-library (MIT).