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Keystone: Project Harness Installer

Ian Johnson on June 02, 2026

I built a new tool. It is a Level 2 project harness installer (blurs into Level 3). The page is at tacoda.dev/keystone. The repo is at github.com/t...
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Ian Johnson

Is there something missing? Something not working well? If you have any feedback or suggestions at all, I humbly request filing a GitHub Issue. My goal is to keep it minimal, but well-covered at init and have the agent fill in all the discoverable stuff during bootstrap.

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Ian Johnson

Update: I have opened up discussions on the GitHub project. I'd like to treat that as the gateway to work. And I already have a question! I'd appreciate your feedback here: github.com/tacoda/keystone/discuss...
Thanks!

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Ian Johnson

Warning: there will likely be some churn with this tool as I learn more. 1.0 will be a solid checkpoint after the idea and design are more robust.

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Ian Johnson

Update: migrations have been added as of 0.6.0. There is still file churn that is expected to happen, but now you can migrate your harness files after upgrading. I commit to always being forward-compatible. 1.0 will be a major milestone in this, but there is still more work to do before that. Thanks!

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Ian Johnson

Layer 3 separation and inheritance landing today in 0.9.0!

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Echo

Harness installers are the right abstraction but the install/upgrade contract needs to be the same or you get drift across teams. Looking forward to see how Keystone handles breaking changes.

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Ian Johnson

Last pieces in place. There is a hierarchy in place that can be overridden with a strict option. The only thing left is some kind of authority. That will come later. Separate repos are isolated enough for now.

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Ian Johnson

Part of this has been resolved.

migrations have been added as of 0.6.0. There is still file churn that is expected to happen, but now you can migrate your harness files after upgrading. I commit to always being forward-compatible.

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Ian Johnson

The other part of this has been resolved: org-level policies are pulled in like packages. Still the authority issue to solve, but the minimum viable solution is in place.

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Ian Johnson

Still working on the upgrade piece. For install, the harness drops into a folder in your repo - you version control it with your code, allowing others to use it.

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Gilder Miller

Great work! Love to see upgrade version.