Harness overview

The Belloga harness feeds a per-branch work plan and your rules to Claude Code sessions started in a Belloga terminal.

Principles

• Only inside Belloga: Sessions started in other terminals or apps are left alone.
• Never forced: Belloga does not edit the harness in ~/.claude. When instructions conflict, the session follows your harness or asks you. A missing or malformed work plan is not blocked.
• The app sets the shape, you set the content: Belloga decides where plans live and the skeleton it reads. You decide what goes in through templates.

Four parts

• Work plans: requirements.md, design.md and tasks.md per branch, kept outside the repository.
• Templates and rules: the shape of plan documents, and the rules added to every session.
• Harness mode: edit templates and rules from the sidebar.
• Hooks: the Claude Code hooks that put all of this into a session.

Turning hooks on and off

The hook switches are under Claude Code in the Agents tab of the settings.

Hook	What it does
Session status hook	Receives session status, notifications and usage. On by default
Plan hook	Tells the session where this branch’s work plan lives and how to write it, when the session starts
Rules hook	Adds your rules when a session starts and again after the context is compacted or cleared with /clear
Worktree hook	Makes the session ask where to put a worktree before creating one, and changes the app’s default location

The plan, rules and worktree hooks are installed only when you turn them on. All turns them on and off together, and More shows the events each hook registers.