harn deinit

harn deinit [--harness claude-code|cursor|codex] [--dry-run] [--project-root <path>] [--purge-state]

The inverse of harn init (the same pairing as git submodule deinit). It undoes the project-level changes init made, surgically, so anything you added by hand survives. It removes the project wiring, not the CLI itself — to remove the harn binary from your machine, see Removing the CLI below.

Installed from a git clone?

harn deinit reverses the project wiring but leaves the PATH symlinks that scripts/setup.sh created for a git clone. From a clone, run ./scripts/teardown.sh instead — the one-command mirror of scripts/setup.sh. It calls harn deinit for you, removes those symlinks, and (on a terminal) offers to delete this project’s .harnery/ state and the clone itself. It forwards --purge-state, --remove-clone, --dry-run, --project-root, and --harness straight through.

By default it reverses everything init wrote outside the CLI, surgically:

1. Removes Harnery’s hook entries from the chosen harness’s settings file. A hook counts as Harnery’s when its command contains agent-hook , so any hook you added stays put. If pulling Harnery’s entries leaves the settings file with nothing but what init itself wrote (no hooks, at most a version key), the file is deleted rather than left as an empty shell.
2. Strips the agent-facing guidance (ADR 0008): the AGENTS.md instructions block (and the CLAUDE.md import shim) are spliced out; a file left empty once its region is gone is deleted, one with your own content around the region is preserved. The harn-decide / harn-council skill files are deleted — but only if they still carry Harnery’s ownership marker. A skill you hand-edited (marker gone) is left in place with a warning, never silently clobbered.

harn deinit            # unwire hooks + strip the block/skills; keep .harnery/ state
harn deinit --dry-run  # preview every change without writing

harn deinit
  root: /path/to/project
  + removed 10 harnery hook(s) from .claude/settings.json (1 other hook(s) kept)
  + removed the instructions block from AGENTS.md
  + deleted skill harn-decide
  + deleted skill harn-council
  · left .harnery/ coord root in place (pass --purge-state to delete it)
Done. harnery hooks are unwired; restart your harness session to drop them.

The .harnery/ coord root is kept by default

init also creates the .harnery/ directory, which holds runtime state: the event stream, council manifests, agent identities, scratchpads. deinit leaves it alone unless you ask, because that history may be worth keeping.

Pass --purge-state to delete it (and the binName stamp in .harnery/config.jsonc along with it):

harn deinit --purge-state   # also rm -rf .harnery/  (destructive)

On a terminal you don’t need the flag: standalone harn deinit asks before deleting .harnery/ (defaulting to no) whenever --purge-state wasn’t passed and a coord root exists. The prompt never fires off a TTY, so piped / CI runs stay flag-driven. After a real run it also prints how to remove the harnery CLI itself, since a running command can’t delete its own package. An embedding host’s <bin> deinit skips both — it owns its own output and install lifecycle.

--dry-run shows the deletion without performing it (and never prompts).

Removing the CLI

harn deinit unwires a project; it never removes the harn binary (a running command can’t delete its own package). Once you’ve unwired the projects you care about, remove the CLI itself:

curl -fsSL https://harnery.com/uninstall.sh | bash   # or: npm rm -g harnery / bun remove -g harnery

From a git clone, ./scripts/teardown.sh --remove-clone deletes the checkout instead.

Idempotent + non-destructive

Safe to re-run. A second pass finds nothing to remove and reports so. If the settings file exists but isn’t valid JSON, deinit refuses to touch it rather than risk clobbering your config. It only ever removes Harnery’s own entries and prunes the keys those entries emptied; every other hook, and every non-hook setting (permissions, model, etc.), is preserved.

Harness support

Same matrix as init; pass --harness to target a specific one. deinit scans every hook key for Harnery commands (not just the ones the named harness wires), so it cleans up entries left behind even if a harness’s event set changed between versions.

--harness	Settings file
claude-code (default)	.claude/settings.json
cursor	.cursor/hooks.json
codex	.codex/hooks.json

To fully remove Harnery from a project that wired several harnesses, run deinit once per harness, then --purge-state on the last call.