Harvest — Cross-Rig Knowledge Consolidation

Nightly usage (2026-04-09): $dream start now runs harvest as part of its bounded compounding loop. Use $harvest for manual sweeps, CI runs, or when Dream is disabled. Dream holds .agents/overnight/run.lock while running — manual ao harvest will refuse until the lock releases.

Sweep all .agents/ directories across the workspace, extract learnings, patterns, and research, deduplicate cross-rig, and promote high-value items to the global knowledge hub (~/.agents/learnings/).

Naming gotcha. $harvest promotes into ~/.agents/learnings/, not ~/.agents/. Users often say "harvest all to ~/.agents" and mean the promotion hub. If you really want every raw artifact (not just the promotion set) mirrored verbatim, you want rsync, not $harvest.

Which skill do I need?

See docs/skills-decision-tree.md for the full "which skill next?" decision table covering harvest, compile, dream, knowledge-activation, and quickstart.

What This Skill Does

The knowledge flywheel captures learnings per-rig, but they stay siloed. Harvest closes the loop by walking all rigs, extracting artifacts, deduplicating by content hash, and promoting high-confidence items to the global hub where every rig can access them via ao inject.

When to use: Before an evolve cycle, after a burst of development across multiple rigs, or weekly as part of knowledge governance.

Output: .agents/harvest/latest.json (catalog) + promoted files in ~/.agents/learnings/

Execution Steps

Step 1: Preview Scope (Dry Run)

ao harvest --dry-run --quiet

Read .agents/harvest/latest.json and report:

• Rigs discovered
• Total artifacts extracted
• Unique vs duplicate count
• Promotion candidates (artifacts >= min confidence)

Step 2: Confirm Execution

Skip if --auto is set. Otherwise, show the dry-run summary and ask:

Harvest will promote N artifacts from M rigs to ~/.agents/learnings/.
Proceed? [Approve / Adjust threshold / Abort]

Step 3: Execute Harvest

ao harvest --roots ~/gt/ --promote-to ~/.agents/learnings --min-confidence 0.5

Step 4: Post-Harvest Cleanup

Run dedup on the promotion target to clean up any remaining duplicates:

ao dedup --merge ~/.agents/learnings/ 2>/dev/null || true

Step 5: Report Results

Report to user:

• Rigs scanned
• Artifacts extracted and unique count
• Duplicates found (with top duplicate groups)
• Artifacts promoted (with provenance)
• Top discoveries (highest-confidence cross-rig patterns)

Flags

Quick Start

$harvest                          # Full sweep with confirmation
$harvest --auto                   # Hands-free sweep
$harvest --min-confidence 0.7     # Only promote high-confidence items
$harvest --roots ~/gt/,~/projects/ # Scan additional directories

Governance

See references/governance.md for ongoing governance model: size budgets, sweep frequency, staleness thresholds, and cross-rig synthesis triggers.

See Also

• $compile — Single-rig Mine/Grow/Defrag
• $flywheel — Flywheel health monitoring
• $inject — Knowledge injection into sessions
• $forge — Transcript knowledge extraction

Reference Documents

• references/governance.md — Governance model for ongoing knowledge consolidation