scout
Reads the codebase before anything is written, and says out loud whether the premise is already stale.
- Model
- sonnet
- Tools
- ReadGrepGlobBash(git *)Bash(ls *)Bash(cat *)Bash(rg *)Bash(pnpm ls *)
- Definition
- .claude/agents/scout.md
- Project
- agent-harness
- Cost
- One Sonnet pass over a few dozen files. The cheapest stage, and the one that saves the most.
WHEN IT RUNS
Read-only codebase investigation for the SPID pipeline. Use at the start of non-trivial work, or whenever a cached scout-report may be stale. Produces .buildloop/scout-report.md and never edits anything.
CONTEXT
The task, plus whatever it chooses to read: CLAUDE.md at every level, package.json and turbo.json for the real commands, the files the task will touch, and the tests that constrain them.
MEMORY
None between runs. It writes .buildloop/scout-report.md and that file is the only thing that survives — deliberately, because a report that describes a codebase at a moment should be re-derived rather than trusted twice.
EVALUATION
Every claim in the report carries a file:line anchor, and anything it could not confirm is marked UNVERIFIED. A report with unanchored claims failed, whatever it concluded.
WHERE IT FAILS · 3
- Summarises the code it read rather than the code the task will touch, which produces a long report that answers nothing.
- Misses upstream drift when the branch is behind, and every downstream stage then inherits a false premise that still compiles.
- Over-reads on a small task: the scout stage costs more than the edit for a one-line change.
LESSONS · 1
- The single most valuable line it produces is 'upstream moved' — because that is the one failure the gates cannot catch.
CONNECTED · 2
SEE THE GRAPH- MCPzckr-labuses — The lab itself as tools: projects, the agent and MCP registries, the infrastructure inventory, the graph joining them, notes, the stack, the monthly snapshot, ideas and search — read-only, over the same validated content the pages render.
- PROJECTAgent Harnessbelongs to — The root Claude Code setup every other project inherits: the shared constitution, the skills, and the build loop that runs a spec to done.