Roll out one harness config across a team
Five engineers, a dozen repos, and each repo's CLAUDE.md was
copy-pasted from a different ancestor. The goal: one versioned pack, pinned in every repo's
harness.json, updated deliberately instead of drifting silently.
1. Decide what "our harness" is
Start from a built-in pack (baselane audit recommends one), or
create your own pack holding the team's agents, skills, hooks,
and conventions. A pack is the unit of rollout — if the team's rules aren't in a pack, they can't
be versioned or distributed.
2. Land it in the first repo by hand
npx baselane apply . --pack software-engineer-harness
git add -A && git commit -m "adopt baselane harness"
Use the first repo to shake out conflicts with existing hand-written config (see
adopting with an existing CLAUDE.md). What lands is a
committed harness.json pinning the exact pack version — the artifact
every other repo will converge on.
3. Distribute to the rest by PR
baselane distribute acme/api --pack software-engineer-harness
baselane distribute acme/webapp --pack software-engineer-harness
distribute renders the pack and opens a pull request against the
target repo instead of pushing to its branches. Each repo's owners review the diff — including
how the managed regions merged into their existing files — and merge on their own schedule.
Nothing is force-pushed anywhere.
4. Onboard new repos and new machines
New repo? One command reproduces the team setup:
npx baselane apply . --pack software-engineer-harness
For personal, machine-level config (the pieces that live in
~/.claude rather than a repo), the same commands take
-g:
baselane install github:obra/superpowers@v6.1.1 -g
baselane drift -g
5. Move the team forward in lockstep
When the pack changes, publish a new version. Repos stay on their
pinned version until someone runs baselane update or merges a bump PR
— upgrades are explicit, reviewable events, not ambient drift. Repos that haven't bumped are
visibly behind, not silently different.
baselane update # bump this repo's pins to latest
baselane drift # verify what's on disk matches the pins
What this replaces
The copy-paste chain. Before: someone improves a prompt in one repo and eleven others never hear about it. After: the improvement is a pack version, every repo's distance from it is measurable, and adopting it is a one-line PR.