Nine coding harnesses vs. your laptop

This looks like such a nice cli/tui talking/chat harness - an agent with which I can work on non-coding tasks (where it literally doesn't need any tool - maybe a read tool for few files in that folder, or not even that) - writing critique (w/ strict strict for on generation/suggestion), analysis, summary etc.

I've been so far using pi like this:

> pi --offline --no-extensions --no-skills --no-prompt-templates -nc -nt --thinking low --system-prompt "$(cat <custom purpose path for system/role prompt>)

Purpose was to reduce token usage to an absolute minimum (zero extra token) as often I use this per use API keys (and not my GLM key, which let's say, is a bit "different" when it comes to conversations).

Are there any other tools specifically designed for such tasks? Even though hax looks like the absolute bare minimum one can go while still being usable.

I wish there was also tools that would refuse and reject (or prevent) models from inserting "thinking" messages into responses. They keep appending those and that very soon that part starts snowballing on steroids.

ive looked at your project before but forgot about it. I think mine is in a similar vein: https://github.com/mischief/clm

it grew out of annoyance of dependencies on js runtimes, probably similar to you. mine additionally works on solaris and esp32.

could be interesting to collaborate!

It's absolutely amazing to see this harness. I've been on the lookout for something like this for a while now. I've used both Pi and Maki in the past but was unhappy with certain aspects for both. Pi is not respecting XDG and the author refuses to change and maki you curl an install script into bash.

So the points about it being a well behaved unix tool, installing it via brew and it not being react are points I - love - to see.

Thank you for making it, I will definitely try it out.

Digging down through the source code, I see "const char *system_prompt_append;" in the config.

A lot of people have multiple files for their injected system prompts (a.la openclaw or hermes), I think it would be a good idea to either add or modify this point to be able to handle multiple file injections (system_prompt_append_folder or the like). Fitting that shape would make it easy to compare to those systems and make it easier for people to transition from those systems to yours.

Happy Hax user here! Thanks again, Oleksandr!

The same thing as the last word of "That is the difference between 22 and 226 seconds, measured." Techies I know would mostly omit "measured"; the rest would show, not tell.

Whatever it is, it’s just as hilarious as Engrish…

Means Claude can't write for shit.

The trick to use Pi is you use it in N ways if you have N use-cases. You need N set of shortcuts/plugins/aliases etc for that. Can get tiring at times.

So I keep Pi for just one case - when I have to easily strip everything out for some work. Anything heavier and OpenCode or Claude are ones. I am sure I can make Pi behave as I've suggested above the "N harnesses within 1 harness" and I even tried but it simply started getting out of hand and using the harness started becoming the frustrating hobby.

As for OMP, I just don't understand why would anyone use that not Pi or other "full-fledged" harnesses.

Pi is a very basic harness by design. On the other hand OMP is a bloated mess of other people’s workflows.

The trick with pi is to extend it yourself as you use it. It’s pretty easy to do.

> And every time I wonder where the people who create these tests are looking when they're deciding which harnesses to test?

Well, everyone and their dog has a custom harness now (including myself!), and more often than not they're just... pretty much the same, just with a slightly tweaked UI and different defaults? The harness needs to either be one of the popular ones, or have some sort of a unique feature which actually differentiates how it runs, not just how it looks/controls like.

For example, one of the unique features of my harness is that the filesystem is completely virtualized and all filesystem I/O is part of the session. This means that any files the agent modifies aren't actually modified on disk until the user uses `/apply`, and rewinding the session also rewinds the state of the disk, and this works for all I/O and all tools (including anything spawned by the `bash` tool), and also supports at-will forking of the session including the filesystem state. This means that the agent can run fully YOLO and won't be able to nuke your disk, and it also means that there's no need to use git worktrees and such because multiple agents can just run in the same directory at the same time without an issue.

Essentially, what I'm trying to say: I'd love to see more experimentation in the harness space which doesn't just involve "a different GUI".

> And every time I wonder where the people who create these tests are looking when they're deciding which harnesses to test?

It seems we need a place where harness creators can pay for that work. There are more people talking about their own harness in this post than talking about the post.

I'll try it.

Isn't using it with GitHub Copilot a violation of GitHub terms of usage, due to usage of internal API? I read that they have an official partnership with OpenCode, and I guess it is fine to use it with OpenAI Codex, but what about other coding agents like maki?

Do I understand correctly that in your harness models don't call tools and pass output of one to another via context, but instead code whole pipeline as small on-demand tools and see only final output?

Qwen 3.6 27B and 3.8 27B are the darlings of local inference at the moment.

The only other thing anyone is using is Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, only by memory-rich people.

Depending on which benchmarks you believe, these models (and the Ornith 1.5 finetune of Qwen 35B-A3B) are competitive at about Opus 4.5 to 4.7 level. That matches my experience in real tasks over the last few months.

Not bad for something you can run at home for a couple of thousand dollars.

I've played with a fair few local models, Qwen 3.8 27B is the only one I've currently kept around (Muse Glimmer came the closest but will vacillate wildly if pushed, Qwen doesn't seem to do that (as much), I don't use it to generate code, it's essentially a glorified linter, it's pretty good at spotting dumb stuff you miss when you proofcheck your own code, especially things like comment drift where I alter a function and it makes the comment slightly (or sometimes wildly) out of sync with behaviour.

It's fine for that (and I happen to have a 24GB VRAM GPU anyway since I game on the same PC).

It's neat but for me not world changing.

It's also just fun to be able to poke stuff and see what it can and can't do (but I could see how it could also become a time trap in cases where it gets kinda close and you want to fix that).

For it's size it's pretty good. I run it and the older Qwen 3.6 35B A3B, which is significantly faster, but also a bit dumber, on both my PC and my MacBook.

Wouldn't trust it for long form coding, but for shorter stuff it's really good.

this is in the repo in benchmarks/matrix for most of these metrics.

uv run python benchmarks/matrix/run.py setup. i'd happily take your hardware's numbers!

I for one am excited to learn more about how it spreads up to 50% between nights, and how nothing between the lean arms is a finding.

Not to mention it's yet another bash does everything harness which compares itself against claude code when the closest competitor is pi.dev?

[dead]

sounds fun, i'll try and add it.

Notion is a "knowledge database" with awful performance and jank, that some people have decided sounded like a perfect place to host their blog for whatever reason. But these shared pages been as buggy as the first time I saw them years ago, not sure what they're doing.

Yes, scrolling with the arrow keys does nothing for several presses, then jumps, then acts normally, then jumps again. Really stupid and annoying.

Also, Alt-Left Arrow doesn't return me to the previous page (Hacker News) and I have to use my mouse.

sorry, its a notion not a real site.

Opencode system prompt contains a lot of stuff but even worse is oh-my-pi where their long prompt looks like random garbage hallucinated by a 2023 LLM:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c_fQoDkULl0 (see around 8:00)

fair longer is always helpful. on a 24gb mac i'm extremely constrained, but all these exercism tasks were plausible to pass at this context length.

sorry its a notion.