Harbour: onboarding for coding agents

A person has asked you to set up Harbour for their work. Read this whole guide before you act, and ask the person before you choose a path.

Harbour is a control plane for AI-assisted software work. It reads the person's task tracker (Linear, GitHub Issues or Projects, Jira, or a local store), writes a checked prompt for the next task, runs that prompt on a coding agent, and checks the result against evidence such as CI results and merged diffs. This deployment is at https://harbour.cat.

Ask or look first

Before choosing a path, do one of these:

  • Ask the person what they want from Harbour, and whether they already keep their work in a tracker.
  • Or, if you can, read the repositories and tracker they point you to, to see what they already use.

Do not start a path the person has not agreed to.

The paths

(a) Just looking: a local workspace

Use this when the person wants to see Harbour without signing in anywhere.

The person creates the workspace in their own browser: they open https://harbour.cat/swipe, choose "+ local workspace" in the navigation bar, and the workspace opens for them. Do not create it for them with an HTTP request. A workspace made that way belongs to your cookie jar, and the person will not see it in their browser.

Once the person has a local workspace, ask them to open its Proxy page, https://harbour.cat/workspace/<urlKey>/proxy, and copy the Agent Prompt there. That prompt carries its own token for this workspace. Follow it as it says, under the same rules as in path (b).

(b) A real tracker: use this when a door below matches the person's tracker

  1. The person signs in through the door for their tracker. Sign-in is a browser step only the person can complete. If no door below fits their tracker, use path (a) and say so to the person.
  2. After sign-in, ask the person to open their workspace's Proxy page, https://harbour.cat/workspace/<urlKey>/proxy (the workspace key is in the address bar once they are signed in), and copy the Agent Prompt there. That prompt is written for you, and it carries a token. Follow it as it says. Treat the token as a secret: do not repeat it in your replies, and do not write it to a file, a log or a commit.

Sign-in doors on this deployment:

(c) Run work on their own machine

The person can turn their machine into a runner from https://harbour.cat/workspace/<urlKey>/runner. Only the workspace owner can mint a runner key. Ask the person to open that page and follow it. Do not mint keys yourself.

What only the person can do

  • Sign in (OAuth) through any of the doors above.
  • Connect an OpenRouter key where prompts need one. The person does this on the Settings page, through the connect link https://harbour.cat/auth/openrouter. This deployment has a free tier, so no OpenRouter key is needed to start.
  • Mint the owner runner key on the runner setup page.

No endpoint exists for these steps, so do not look for one or work around them.

Where to read more