keystone-mcp — Keystone Harness Manager

Project archived in favor of Keystone

The Keystone Harness Manager is the end-to-end harness manager for any project. It's a single MCP server (keystone-mcp on PyPI) that owns the full lifecycle of a project harness:

• scaffold + materialize a shipped template tree under .keystone/harness/

• broker rules, reasoning, skills, and commands from any external source (markdown, folder, repo, GitHub, Confluence, Notion, Jira, Linear, Slack)

• run computational and inferential sensors as blocking checks

• resolve a cascade across external sources and the project layer (canonical locks, required gaps, conflicts, unreachable items)

• apply forward-only shipped-template patches as the manager evolves

• drive Learning + Pruning flywheels via shipped playbooks and skills

• overlay the agent menu file (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, …) without clobbering any pre-existing user content

The agent treats each retrieved payload differently:

• rules — constraints to obey (must / should / may)

• reasoning — background facts and intent

• skills — procedural how-to knowledge (multi-step playbooks)

• commands — canned invocations (shell commands, scripts, named recipes)

Instead of cramming organizational context into every system prompt, the agent reads keystone://context/{topic} resources or calls keystone_get_context(topic) and the broker fans the request out to the right backing source.

Status

0.2.0. Pre-1.0; the package name on PyPI stays keystone-mcp. Phases 1–28 shipped per FEATURE_PARITY_PLAN.md and CHANGELOG.md. 361 tests pass.

Related MCP server: Catalyst MCP Server

Adapters

Source types (type: in .keystone/context.yaml):

Install

Published to PyPI as keystone-mcp.

pip install keystone-mcp             # core
pip install "keystone-mcp[tokens]"   # + tiktoken-backed budget tokenizer
uvx keystone-mcp                     # one-shot run via uv
pipx install keystone-mcp            # install + add to PATH

Without the tokens extra, keystone://harness/budget falls back to a deterministic word-count proxy (~0.75 words / token). With the extra, the budget reports exact cl100k_base token counts.

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/tacoda/keystone-mcp.git
cd keystone-mcp
uv sync
uv run keystone-mcp        # console entry point

Wire into a Claude Code (or any MCP host) project. Add to .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "keystone": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["keystone-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "KEYSTONE_CONFIG": "/path/to/your/project/.keystone/context.yaml"
      }
    }
  }
}

The config path defaults to .keystone/context.yaml relative to the working directory; override with KEYSTONE_CONFIG.

Quickstart

1. Create .keystone/context.yaml in your project:

   sources:
     docs:
       type: markdown
       root: .keystone/context/
   
   topics:
     deploy-policy:
       description: |
         Rules and context for production deploys.
       sources:
         - source: docs
           query: { file: deploy-policy.md }
           classify:
             rules: { heading: "Rules", severity: must }
             reasoning: { heading: "Background" }
       cache: 15m

2. Create .keystone/context/deploy-policy.md:

   # Deploy Policy
   
   ## Rules
   
   - MUST run full CI green before any production deploy.
   - SHOULD prefer Tuesday/Wednesday morning deploys.
   
   ## Background
   
   The team adopted these rules after a 2025 incident.

3. Start the server. The agent now sees deploy-policy in keystone_list_topics and can read keystone://context/deploy-policy to load the envelope.

The repo's own .keystone/context.yaml is a working example with topics for deploys, ownership, coding standards, and a release playbook (plus commented-out examples of every external adapter).

MCP surface

Tools

Prompts

Lifecycle workflows that seed multi-step agent conversations. The agent invokes a prompt, walks the phases, and calls scaffold tools along the way.

All harness paths are fixed under .keystone/harness/ — the .keystone/ directory is team-shared and version-controlled. Never put secrets there. Reference them via env:VAR in .keystone/context.yaml instead. Scaffold tools refuse to write files whose names look like secrets (secret, token, credential, password, api_key, private, envfile, …).

Resources

Envelope shape

Every retrieval returns the same envelope. Example:

{
  "topic": "deploy-policy",
  "rules": [
    {
      "id": "rules-001",
      "text": "run full CI green before any production deploy.",
      "source": "markdown://deploy-policy.md#rules",
      "severity": "must"
    }
  ],
  "reasoning": [
    {
      "text": "The team adopted these rules after a 2025 incident.",
      "source": "markdown://deploy-policy.md#background"
    }
  ],
  "skills": [],
  "commands": [],
  "fetched_at": "2026-06-10T14:32:00+00:00",
  "cache_hit": false
}

Configuration

Topics

Topics are the agent-facing abstraction. Each topic binds one or more adapter calls and declares how their output classifies into the four kinds:

topics:
  repo-policy:
    description: Combined ownership and branch-protection rules.
    sources:
      - source: docs
        query: { file: owners.md }
        classify:
          rules: { heading: "Required reviewers" }
      - source: gh
        query: { type: codeowners }
      - source: gh
        query: { type: branch_protection, branch: main }
    cache: 5m

Single-source topics can use the shorthand:

topics:
  rollback:
    description: Rollback procedure.
    source: docs
    query: { file: rollback.md }
    classify:
      rules: { heading: "Rules" }

Multi-source merge

When two sources contribute rules whose normalized text matches:

• Highest severity wins (must > should > may).

• Ties at the top severity keep both rules so each source stays cited.

Reasoning, skills, and commands stay additive — no deduplication.

Classify selectors

markdown, confluence, and notion share the same heading-based vocabulary. Sections split by H2; skills/commands sub-split by H3.

classify:
  rules:
    heading: "Rules"             # single or list, e.g. ["Rules", "Must"]
    severity: must               # default for bullets without MUST/SHOULD/MAY prefix
  reasoning:
    heading: "Background"
    # or
    all: true                    # everything not matched by another kind
  skills:
    heading: "Procedures"        # each H3 → one skill (name + body)
  commands:
    heading: "Commands"          # each H3 → one command (first code block = invocation)

For github, jira, linear, slack the query type determines the kind (e.g. codeowners → rules, recent_prs → reasoning).

Secrets

Reference environment variables with the env: prefix:

sources:
  gh:
    type: github
    repo: acme/widgets
    auth: env:GITHUB_TOKEN

The loader fails fast at startup if a referenced env var is unset.

Cache

Default is in-memory (lost on restart). Persistent sqlite cache survives process restarts:

cache:
  backend: sqlite
  path: .keystone/cache.db

Per-topic TTLs use 5s / 10m / 2h / 1d syntax.

Development

uv sync                     # install deps
uv run pytest -q            # run tests
uv run python -m keystone_mcp.server   # run server

The test suite uses respx to mock all external APIs — no live credentials required.

License

TBD.