R Observatory: Metrics for harness version 0.2.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

harness

0.2.0Package record

Curated Agentic Harnesses for R Professional Roles

0packages depend

990downloads / year

74.9%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Pedro Carvalho BromCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Issues ↗

A bootstrapper that launches a command-line coding agent of the user's choice in a terminal tab pre-configured for a professional R role. Each role is described by a curated harness: a subset of community skills, a system prompt, a folder layout, and quality gates. The package does not run an agent loop and does not call a language model; it discovers the chosen coder binary, generates its configuration, links the curated skills, and opens the terminal. Code written by the agent is run manually by the user, by design, so that every generated script passes through a human audit gate before execution.

Changes in 0.2.0

Editor bridge and the Windows support from the development line.

New RStudio addin send_selection_to_coder(): it reads the editor selection, asks for a short note, and sends the note with a file:line reference to the coder running in the harness terminal that launch() opened. Bind it to a keyboard shortcut through Tools, Modify Keyboard Shortcuts, Addins. The addin forwards text the user wrote; it does not run an agent loop and does not call a language model. It needs no new dependency.
launch() records the terminal it opens, so the addin targets it; when the record is stale, the addin finds a harness terminal by its caption.
Includes the Windows support for binary discovery and terminal launch listed under 0.1.1.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("harness", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("pcbrom/harness")

Development version from pcbrom/harness. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-harness

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-harness

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-harness

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 58 s · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK8 OK2026-06-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.2.0

READMEYes · 2,112 wordsVignettesNoNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 0.2.0Citation fileNoWebsitenot declared in DESCRIPTION

Help pages: 15 (1 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 69%9 run in a plain check · 4 never run
Exported functions with examples: 93%
Documented parameters: 98%
Return-value docs: 100%
Help pages citing references: 0%

How these are measured

Downloads

990

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #19,167 · ~3/day · ~83/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

27130 days

67390 days

9901 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on34 r2u4 autocran

How downloads are counted

Repository

pcbrom/harness ↗Account: pcbrom

1Stars

1Forks

3Open issues

1Open PRs

1Releases

37Commits

1Commit identities

agenticclaudecoding-agentcranllmrr-packagereproducible-research

37 commits · Last activity 2026-08-24

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 100%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 0
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Forks over time

2026-07-14 · 02026-09-28 · 1

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

5 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 3 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/pcbrom/harness on 2026-10-11.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows

CRAN release process (2)

cran-comments.mdCRAN-SUBMISSION

Research and citation (1)

Zenodo

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

AI coding toolsBeta

This repository shows signs of AI coding tools.

Claude Codefirst seen 2026-08-24
Seen in the repository: CLAUDE.md
Named in .Rbuildignore: CLAUDE.md

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (updated 2026-09-27)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

5 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing harness adds 2 packages (2 with compiled code, 1.1 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: jsonlite 1.0 MB, yaml 106 KB.

Depends (1)

R >= 4.2

Imports (2)

jsonlite yaml

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (3)

rstudioapi testthat withr

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Pedro Carvalho Brom

Releases (2)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

0.2.0Latest
record
2026-08-24 · current release · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
send_selection_to_coder
0.1.0
record
2026-06-09
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24

Package metadata

First published: 2026-06-09
Total releases: 2 / 1 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 4.2
Download size: 40 KB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("harness")

Format

Carvalho Brom, P. (2026). harness: Curated Agentic Harnesses for R Professional Roles (Version 0.2.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.harness

This package has no citation file, so citation() returns this entry built from DESCRIPTION.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for harness version 0.2.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-18. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-18, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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