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Well, I'd love to use an open-source harness! My issue is that Opus 5.5 / Fable 5.1 has been the best model for me to work with, and it's way cheaper to use it with the subscription to Claude Code Max. I won't pay more just to use an open-source harness. I'd rather just wait it out and stay on Claude Code not having to constantly jump around / switch tools as the industry matures.

1. A lot of people already have Claude Code set up, and it's easier to keep using that than to install something new.

2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.

3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.

4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.

5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.

[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?

A lot of the extant harnesses are built around interaction, which adds a bunch of complexity.

Eg an agent that only runs off a webhook trigger doesn’t have a use for all the UI stuff Pi does (and you may not want the local state like Pi does by default).

I’m still sort of with you, I’d generally do ACP to an open source agent. You do get much finer grained control if you use one of these agent SDKs (there’s a bajillion of these as well).

I havent switched to a 3rd party harness yet so quick question for anyone, does the claude code or codex harness not give the models a significant improvement in their ability? Or does prompting a model on openrouter vs claude code yield the same result?

There's just not really any features in an open-source harness that blow my mind enough to move off the highly-subsidized claude code subscription. I type in instructions and it spits out code. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the more complex features being floated are productivity theater.

Why would you not just build your own harness in October 2026? Gateway, memory, tool calls, LLM api - the basics are pretty simple to get started and get to a point where your harness can be self-improving to add any new features that you need.

oh-my-pi works great with Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI subscriptions. Being able to quickly to switch between models without changing your workflow is such a joy - for me at least.

Claude Code wont let me use their sub with one as far as I remember. So I'm stuck with their convoluted TUI. It does what I need, and when it doesn't I just build tools that Claude consumes. The new "Artifacts" feature has helped a bit though.

Cheaper tokens in the $200 subscription.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Pi etc you're paying the full API price.

better discounts when compare with API cost, and frontier lab harnesses and models are tuned to each other

A main criteria in 2026 should be whether the harness gives you access to all model families for just the harness author's models.

More and more harnesses are headed this way, there are two notable holdouts.

If you tell me I should OpenCode over Claude Code in October 2026 - then you have no idea what you are talking about.

An IQ too large to measure

And Google has ADK (Agent Development Kit)

I think their agentic cloud stuff is their best product right now. This makes sense to me. We still have subs because its nice to have something that works when Claude doesn't, it was already approved, and Composer actually is a decent value. I will sometimes use the cloud agent to put up a PR when I'm not at my computer and I remember it exists.

So a few people started using grok bot and I'll probably regret that some day, but honestly the deployment model they have here for custom agents is kind of appealing to me, much more than BigLang.

SpaceX-stans (god i can't believe i just typed that) use it, there's a whole subculture grokking (heinlein is turning in his grave) their way towards the same vibe coded nonsense as the rest of us.

I see people spending so much time creating "workflow" skills that have no benchmark whatsoever to prove they are any more effective than plain one sentence prompts.

Gotta justify that $160k/yr salary somehow I guess, and if the AI is writing all the code you used to write and your job is now to manage the AI, what better way to spend the days than making new AI tools and workflows and markdown files all day

That's the whole point with AI. It's consumerism applied to software... And it sucks

why do we even care, this is a clear, lets move away from `people pushing software to git` to `agent is pushing software, agentic or not , to somehwere, db, git, or something else` human does involved in this unless there is a problem. JS or Python, is really not essential in this case, maybe it's WASM built from rust. it's not for human.

Cursor moving this direction, is a prep work where human no longer command that much , hence the usage will drop. e.g. their core product is vulnerable. Software factories, is the ultimate game over for our industry.

I attribute this to "it's so new and we don't know what the right answer is yet", but you may very well be right

> endless technologies with little to no adaption.

I think the difference is that those endless technologies will probably be used by other agents without people's explicit knowledge.

I don't think I'll ever understand this argument. Especially from purported "hackers."

Why is a large number of ideas, technologies, frameworks, etc. bad?

You mean except for all the obvious reasons?

My 2c is that agents are not at the level where companies can easily just have unconstrained LLM with tools and let it be. Different parts of the workflow can have different models, different tools, different constraints, guardrails, etc.

The entrypoint still has to come from somewhere, and it's much more convenient to be able to explain the security and legal teams how data is handled, what is logged, how you can have control over a scenario where the agent does something unexpected.

Sure, for a personal project that could be enough, but we all know those companies target enterprise customers, and you would be surprised how little adoption there is when it comes to workflow automation due to the lack of controls.

>runtime that runs the LLM with tools

This "runtime" is what you are building with LangChain.. A harness like claude code/codex etc is general purpose and its env is a shell + tools. But with a custom runtime (basically a loop where we ask llm what to do next), we can give it specific tools which we define in code. This can help with things like authorization since, well its custom code you own.. so the runtime gets the tools scoped to the users permissions etc.

What's the point in putting the vibe back in if you're implementing a specific software development process to avoid the vibe?