ADR-182: npx ruview — A RuView Agent Harness Minted via MetaHarness

Context

RuView (WiFi-DensePose) is a deep stack — 15 Rust crates, an ESP32 firmware line, a sensing-server, a CLI, ~180 ADRs, a calibration pipeline, training recipes, and a hard cultural rule that every claim must be independently reproducible (the "prove everything" ethos, after the project was accused of AI-slop). The barrier to entry is correspondingly steep: a newcomer who wants to "set up WiFi sensing" must discover the right firmware variant, provision an ESP32 over a Windows-only Python subprocess, point it at the sensing-server, run calibrate → enroll → train-room, and know which numbers are MEASURED vs CLAIMED. We already encode this knowledge as Claude Code subagents (ruview-onboarding-guide, ruview-config-engineer, ruview-training-engineer) — but those only exist inside this repo's .claude/agents/, only on Claude Code, and only for someone who has already cloned the monorepo.

Separately, this session shipped MetaHarness ([email protected]): a tool that "mints a custom AI agent harness from any repo", runnable on 9 hosts (claude-code, codex, pi-dev, hermes, openclaw, rvm, copilot, opencode, github-actions) over a wasm-primary / NAPI-RS-fallback kernel, with a cost-optimal model router (@metaharness/router, the productized DRACO Phase-2 k-NN finding) and ed25519/SLSA/SBOM provenance baked in. Crucially, MetaHarness already ships a vertical:ruview template in its template list. That template is generic scaffolding; it is not wired to RuView's actual tools, agents, or the "prove everything" guardrails.

The gap: there is no single, host-portable, provenance-signed entry point that gives any user an AI agent that actually knows how to operate RuView. A user should be able to run one command —

npx ruview

— in an empty directory (or alongside an ESP32) and get an agent harness that can onboard them, configure firmware, drive a live capture, train a room model, and refuse to overstate accuracy — on whichever coding host they already use.

Decision

Mint a first-class RuView agent harness from this repo using MetaHarness, harden its vertical:ruview template into a RuView-specific harness with a real MCP tool surface and the project's honesty guardrails, and publish it as npx ruview.

npx ruview is not a new runtime. It is a thin, versioned distribution of a MetaHarness harness: the kernel + host adapters + a RuView "genome" (skills, agents, MCP tools, guardrails) generated from and pinned against this monorepo. The harness is the product; npx ruview is the front door.

Why mint-from-repo instead of hand-writing a harness

MetaHarness's value here is exactly the work we would otherwise hand-roll across 9 hosts: host-specific config (.claude/settings.json MCP + hooks for claude-code, the codex/copilot/opencode equivalents), the kernel that abstracts wasm-vs-native, the cost router, and the provenance chain. We write the RuView knowledge once as host-neutral genome assets; MetaHarness projects them onto each host adapter. This also keeps the harness regenerable: when the CLI or an ADR changes, re-mint and re-pin rather than maintaining 9 divergent copies.

What the harness contains (the RuView genome)

1. Skills / playbooks (host-neutral markdown, projected to each host's skill format):

   • onboard — zero-to-sensing path picker (Docker demo / repo build / live ESP32), the physics caveats, the hardware table. Port of ruview-onboarding-guide.
   • provision-node — ESP-IDF v5.4 Windows-subprocess build/flash/provision flow (the exact MSYSTEM-stripped invocation from CLAUDE.local.md), firmware variant selection (8MB display / 4MB no-display / C6), NVS + WiFi + channel / MAC-filter overrides (ADR-060).
   • calibrate-room — baseline → enroll → extract → train via the wifi-densepose CLI (calibrate/calibrate-serve/enroll/train-room/ room-watch, ADR-151).
   • train-pose — camera-supervised + camera-free training, the MEASURED-vs-CLAIMED discipline, the mean-pose baseline check (ADR-079, ADR-152, ADR-181).
   • verify — run the witness bundle + Python proof (verify.py → VERDICT: PASS), ADR-028.
   • Ports of ruview-config-engineer and ruview-training-engineer.

2. MCP tool surface (@metaharness/kernel-hosted MCP server, one schema per capability — see "MCP tools" below). This is what makes the harness operate RuView, not just talk about it.

3. Guardrails (the differentiator): the harness's system prompt and a pre-output hook enforce the "prove everything" rule — accuracy numbers must be tagged MEASURED (with a reproducer) or CLAIMED; the agent must run the mean-pose baseline before quoting PCK; firmware fixes are never presented as hardware-validated without a real boot log (the exact discipline this session followed for v0.8.1-esp32).

4. Host adapters — claude-code first (P1), then codex / opencode / copilot / pi-dev / hermes / rvm / github-actions (P3+), each via the published @metaharness/host-* package.

5. Router — @metaharness/router routes each step to the cheapest adequate model (e.g. a var-rename or a log-grep → Haiku; calibration-math reasoning or a security review → Sonnet/Opus), mirroring the repo's 3-tier routing (ADR-026).

MCP tools (the operational surface)

Each tool returns structured JSON and is fail-closed: a tool that cannot prove its result (e.g. ruview.node.monitor sees no CSI callbacks) returns an honest negative, never a fabricated success — consistent with the RuField map_privacy fail-closed posture (ADR-262 §3.3).

The mint + pin flow (how the harness is produced)

# P1 — mint from this repo, claude-code host, RuView vertical
npx metaharness ruview --template vertical:ruview --host claude-code \
  --from-existing . --description "RuView WiFi-sensing operator agent" \
  --target ./harness/ruview

# readiness + fit/cost/safety scorecards (ADR-041) — gate before publish
npx metaharness genome .        # 7-section repo readiness
npx metaharness score .  --json # fit / cost / safety
npx metaharness analyze .       # recommended harness plan (no-exec)

The minted harness is committed under harness/ruview/ and pinned (kernel + host-adapter + router versions locked) so npx ruview is reproducible. Re-minting on a CLI/ADR change is a reviewed PR, not an implicit regeneration.

Distribution: npx ruview

A small published package whose bin boots the pinned harness via the kernel:

• Preferred name: ruview (currently free on npm — verified 2026-06-17).
• Risk: npm's typosquat filter may reject ruview as too close to review / preview (this session hit exactly that on ruvn→levn/raven and worldgraph→world-graph). Fallback: publish scoped @ruvnet/ruview (also free) and/or npx ruvnet/ruview straight from GitHub. Decide at publish time; do not unpublish to rename (the 24-h name-lock lesson from worldgraphs).
• bin: { "ruview": "bin/cli.js" } — note bin/cli.js, not ./bin/cli.js (npm strips the ./ form; this broke [email protected] this session).
• npx ruview with no args → onboard skill (interactive path picker). npx ruview <skill> [...] → run a specific skill. npx ruview --host codex → install the harness into an existing repo for that host.

Architecture

            npx ruview                      (thin bin — boots the pinned harness)
                │
        @metaharness/kernel                 (wasm primary · NAPI-RS native fallback)
        ├── host adapter  ── claude-code | codex | opencode | copilot | pi-dev | hermes | rvm | github-actions
        ├── @metaharness/router             (k-NN cost-optimal model routing — DRACO P2 / ADR-026)
        └── RuView genome  (pinned)
            ├── skills      onboard · provision-node · calibrate-room · train-pose · verify
            ├── mcp tools   ruview.node.* · ruview.calibrate · ruview.room.watch · ruview.verify · ruview.claim.check
            └── guardrails  MEASURED-vs-CLAIMED · mean-pose baseline · no-unvalidated-firmware-claims
                │
        RuView assets (the real system the agent drives)
        ├── wifi-densepose CLI       calibrate / enroll / train-room / room-watch
        ├── sensing-server           :3000 / :5005 / :8765
        ├── ESP-IDF subprocess       build / flash / provision / monitor  (COM8/COM9/COM12)
        └── witness bundle + verify.py

Provenance: the harness ships an ed25519 witness + SBOM (SPDX) + SLSA chain (MetaHarness already does this for minted harnesses), so a recipient can verify the RuView harness was built from a specific monorepo commit — the agentic analogue of the firmware witness bundle (ADR-028).

Phases

• P1 — Mint & pin (claude-code). npx metaharness ruview --template vertical:ruview --from-existing . --host claude-code. Port the three ruview-* subagents into host-neutral genome skills. Commit under harness/ruview/, pin versions. Acceptance: npx metaharness score . ≥ threshold; the harness can run onboard and verify end-to-end locally.
• P2 — MCP tool surface. Implement the ruview.* MCP tools over the kernel (start with onboard, verify, claim.check, node.monitor — the read-only / proving tools), then the mutating ones (node.flash, provision, calibrate). Acceptance: ruview.verify returns the witness bundle PASS as structured JSON; ruview.claim.check flags a seeded untagged "100% accuracy" string.
• P3 — Publish npx ruview + multi-host. Publish the bin package (name decision per Distribution). Add codex / opencode / copilot / pi-dev / hermes / rvm / github-actions adapters. Acceptance: npx ruview cold-starts on ≥3 hosts and runs onboard; provenance verifies.
• P4 — Router + guardrail hardening. Wire @metaharness/router; calibrate the 3-tier routing on a RuView task set. Make the MEASURED-vs-CLAIMED guardrail a hard pre-output gate. Acceptance: a benchmark of RuView tasks shows cost reduction vs all-Opus with no quality regression; the guardrail blocks an untagged accuracy claim in a red-team prompt.

Consequences

Positive

• One reproducible, signed entry point (npx ruview) that operates RuView on the host the user already has — onboarding goes from "clone a 15-crate monorepo" to a single npx.
• The "prove everything" ethos becomes executable, not just documentation: the harness enforces MEASURED-vs-CLAIMED and the mean-pose baseline.
• Knowledge written once (host-neutral genome) instead of 9× per host; regenerable from the repo as the system evolves.
• Dogfoods MetaHarness on a hard real vertical, surfacing bugs back to agent-harness-generator (this session already filed #9–#13 there).

Negative / risks

• Drift: a pinned harness goes stale as the CLI/ADRs move; mitigated by a re-mint-on-change PR ritual and a CI check that the genome's referenced CLI flags still exist.
• Surface area: mutating MCP tools (node.flash, provision) touch hardware and the network — must be permission-gated and fail-closed; the firmware-flash tool must never claim hardware validation without a captured boot log.
• Name/typosquat: ruview may be rejected at publish; scoped fallback decided in P3. Do not unpublish-to-rename.
• Host parity: not all 9 hosts support MCP + hooks equally; the guardrail gate may degrade to advisory on weaker hosts — must be disclosed in the badge, not hidden (same honesty principle as ADR-181's backend badge).
• Windows-coupled tooling: the ESP-IDF flow is Windows-subprocess-specific today; the node.* tools are gated to that environment until a cross-platform path exists.

Alternatives considered

1. Keep the ruview-* subagents repo-local (status quo). Zero new surface, but stays Claude-Code-only and clone-gated; no portable front door. Rejected — it's the gap this ADR exists to close.
2. Hand-write a bespoke npx ruview harness (no MetaHarness). Full control, but re-implements the kernel, 9 host adapters, the router, and the provenance chain we already ship — months of duplicated work and 9 divergent configs to maintain. Rejected.
3. Use the generic vertical:ruview template as-is. It's scaffolding with no real tools or guardrails — it would talk about RuView without being able to operate it or enforce honesty. Rejected as insufficient; P2 is precisely the hardening that makes it real.
4. Ship only an MCP server (no harness/host adapters). Covers tools but not the skills, routing, guardrails, or multi-host projection — a strictly smaller subset of this design. Folded in as the P2 layer rather than the whole.

Open questions

• Final published name: bare ruview vs scoped @ruvnet/ruview vs GitHub-only npx ruvnet/ruview — resolve against the typosquat filter at P3.
• Does the harness bundle the wifi-densepose binary, shell out to a user-installed one, or offer both? (Leaning: shell out; print install guidance if absent.)
• Where do the node.* hardware tools live for non-Windows users — defer, or wrap the rvCSI runtime (ADR-095/096) which is cross-platform Rust?
• Should ruview.verify gate npx ruview self-tests in CI (harness can't publish if the witness bundle regresses)?
• Relationship to the RuField MFS harness surface (ADR-260/262) — one harness with a RuField skill, or a sibling npx rufield?

References

• MetaHarness: [email protected] (npx metaharness, templates incl. vertical:ruview; hosts: claude-code/codex/pi-dev/hermes/openclaw/rvm/copilot/ opencode/github-actions), @metaharness/kernel, @metaharness/router, @metaharness/host-*, repo github.com/ruvnet/agent-harness-generator.
• RuView subagents: ruview-onboarding-guide, ruview-config-engineer, ruview-training-engineer (.claude/agents/).
• ADR-026 (3-tier model routing), ADR-028 (witness verification), ADR-041 (MetaHarness scorecards), ADR-060 (channel / MAC-filter overrides), ADR-079 (camera ground-truth training), ADR-095/096 (rvCSI runtime), ADR-151 (per-room calibration), ADR-152/181 (WiFlow / browser pose), ADR-260/262 (RuField bridge).