# Workbench / Harness Candidate

The five current flagships should reach an exceptional operating level before a sixth flagship is promoted.

Candidate sixth flagship: a Project Telos Workbench/Harness that can appear as an IDE extension, CLI, TUI, desktop app, web app, or embedded panel. It does not own gather, index, forum, crucible, or telos logic. It consumes their contracts:

- CLI JSON for universal local execution.
- MCP stdio for local agent and desktop integrations.
- MCP Streamable HTTP for hosted applications and remote workspaces.
- The action envelope for receipts, next actions, and replay.
- The action receipt convention for input digests, component/config identity, side-effect classes, typed stop reasons, verification verdicts, policy decisions, and append-only compensation.
- The context envelope convention for source-ref compression, large-codebase routing, readability gates, and freshness checks.
- The integration catalog for tool names, routing, and provider packaging.

The larger product direction is a unified tool group for modern AI workflow problems: intake, context, routing, verification, provenance, replay, interoperability, and operator trust across local, national, and international work settings. The harness earns that scope by composing the five flagships, not by replacing them.

Promotion gate:

- All five existing flagships expose `status`, `doctor`, and `demo` or exact equivalents.
- The golden workflow proves index -> gather -> forum -> crucible -> telos locally.
- The provider-neutral catalog covers CLI, MCP, OpenAI, Anthropic, Codex plugins, Claude MCP, skills, IDE, CLI, TUI, and app surfaces.
- The harness can switch surfaces without changing tool semantics.

Until that gate is met, Workbench/Harness remains a consumer pattern, not a new flagship implementation.