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A refactor is slow, and a laptop is a bad place to run one. This example uses Harness Runtime to start Claude Code on a repository in a sandbox, keep the workspace across disconnects, and ask you before it runs a shell command. You can close your laptop mid-refactor and pick the session back up from another machine.

This is the baseline example. The ones that follow change one thing about it at a time.

Environment Spec

Save the following as refactor.yaml:

name: checkout-refactor
agent: claude-code
size: mars-4vcpu-8gb
idle_timeout: 30m
repos:
  - your-org/your-service
env:
  HARNESS_INFERENCE_MODEL: anthropic-claude-5-sonnet
secrets:
  HARNESS_INFERENCE_API_KEY: ${HARNESS_INFERENCE_API_KEY}
  GITHUB_TOKEN: ${GITHUB_TOKEN}
egress:
  - github.com
  - api.github.com
  - registry.npmjs.org
permissions:
  default: ask
  rules:
    - tool: file.read
      action: allow
    - tool: file.write
      action: allow
    - tool: bash
      action: ask
    - tool: bash
      match: { command: "rm -rf *" }
      action: deny

Understand the following three choices in the spec before you copy it:

The model comes from DigitalOcean, not from Anthropic. HARNESS_INFERENCE_MODEL names a model from the Serverless Inference catalog, and HARNESS_INFERENCE_API_KEY carries a model access key, so Claude Code runs without an Anthropic account and its tokens bill through DigitalOcean. The two fields work the same way on every coding adapter, and the inference endpoint is added to the egress allowlist for you, which is why the egress list names only the hosts the agent itself reaches.

repos does not clone anything. It tells the agent which repositories it is meant to work on, and the list reaches the sandbox as the HARNESS_WORKSPACE_REPOS variable and the workspace-repos skill. The agent does the cloning itself, using GITHUB_TOKEN and the github.com egress entry. That is why the prompt below asks it to clone.

Rule order matters. For the agent’s own actions, the last matching rule wins, so the rm -rf * deny sits after the general bash rule in order to override it. Put the narrower rule last as a habit: some adapters resolve conflicts by taking the most restrictive rule regardless of order, and none of them surprise you when the specific deny comes after the broad allow. See Permission Policies.

Run It

Make your model access key and a GitHub token available. The ${...} form in the spec reads them from your shell at create time and stores them as write-only tenant secrets, so they never appear in the stored manifest.

export HARNESS_INFERENCE_API_KEY=<your-model-access-key>
export GITHUB_TOKEN=<your-github-token>

Start the session and attach to it:

doctl harness-runtime launch --spec refactor.yaml \
  --prompt "Clone your-org/your-service, then extract the checkout flow in src/checkout into its own service module. Keep the existing tests passing."

The agent starts working and streams to your terminal. When it wants to run a shell command, it pauses for approval: y approves, n rejects, d defers. Type /pending to see everything waiting on you.

Press Ctrl+D to disconnect. The session keeps running, and after 30 minutes of no activity it suspends and stops consuming compute. Reattach by name whenever you want:

doctl harness-runtime launch checkout-refactor

Before you let the agent try something risky, snapshot the workspace so you can get back:

doctl harness-runtime checkpoint create checkout-refactor --label before-refactor

Adapt It

Related

• Manage Sessions for pause, resume, and cleanup.
• Checkpoint, Fork, and Roll Back to branch a warmed-up workspace or undo a bad change.
• Environment Spec Reference for every field above.