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points by rcstank 4 days ago | 0 comments

What harness are you all using? OpenCode?

I have a harness for my harnesses now. My Hermes manages Codex, CC or Cursor now and interact with me via Slack and PRs on GitHub.

It's nice because I can keep going from anywhere, other team members can see and interject in my Slack threads, and Hermes auto updates its skills with any adjustments that we make so we don't have to ask twice.

[–] crossroadsguy 4 days ago

At this point I'd rather try to invest effort and usage in a harness that is FOSS and is actually steered by a non-profit. Goose comes to mind and to be honest I haven't tried it beyond installing and giving it a prompt or two.

Comiong to harnesses, even Pi seems like a weird choice. I mean Pi, until it's "your own customised Pi", is pretty useless and pointless. Besides they are also starting to have their own models/infra business (or is it mostly proxy like OpenCode?).

I have also given up on Herdr and came back to Tmux (and doing a bit of customisation slowly, as I need it). I wanted to try dsh but somehow couldn't brave it. Maybe once I have a good container/vm setup is ready. I know I am biased/discriminatory here, but there are things about which I'd be better safe than sorry.

As for OpenCode: I used V1 a lot and I am struggling with V2 currently. Yes, it just doesn't feel right. It's neither here, nor there. I am not a harness reviewer, so I won't be able to put that into industry accepted words and tests but it doesn't feel useful and right to me. At least Pi is completely stripped (it might be changing though) and then you can make it as you want it. Even Claude Code is better than OpenCode and that's saying something. I find Codex to be quite effective but it doesn't feel familiar. I am still in the middle of some work so I am using OpenCode v2 a lot (and then there's OpenCode Go and I won't want to play around a lot with it) but I will move away. Where? I am not sure yet.

What I feel will work for me? I guess a harness of my own! Forked something smaller/similar? I don't know. No, really! Just like I have never found the "my" notes app and journal app yet, I don't think I should use any of these harnesses if it doesn't work for me, especially now that I can kinda make one (hail LLM/vibe coding :P). It doesn't even have to be a TS/Node monsters most of these harnesses are. More I am reading about, digging deeper (haven't been quite far yet), how models and the "local setup" interact, the more I end up scratching my head – why all this drama and why all these 5 billion GitHub star "harnesses" with trillions of lines of code! Why? It doesn't make sense!

[–] mr_mitm 4 days ago

I found Claude Code to work best. You can use it with any compatible API.

[–] denkmoon 4 days ago

Personally I've found Zed's agent to be much superior to OpenCode. IDK why but it gets better results from the same model on the same task. Using with GLM 5.3 and DeepSeek 4.1.

[–] schaefer 4 days ago

Pi.dev at home.

And I’m slowly writing my own. But it’s garbage at the moment.

[–] pizlonator 4 days ago

I wrote one and kept iterating by using it to fix bugs in itself

I still also use other harnesses, but mine is already at the point where I prefer it more often than not

You should totally keep working on yours. It’s a cool learning experience. And you might stumble on some good ideas that nobody else has had

[–] ylrd91 4 days ago

Don’t write your own. Fork maki.sh and customize it like I did. It’s built in Rust and is absolutely amazing.

[–] schaefer 4 days ago

Thanks for the suggestion, but that’s not a fit for me.

I’m writing my own harness to learn. And I’m writing it in zig.

But, I’ll absolutely add maki.sh to my reading list. So, that’s a win.

[–] crossroadsguy 4 days ago

You should do that. I am also summoning the motivation to start on my own. I guess the worse will be that I fail. Might as well fork sth more basic, or build on top of sth SDK/library like.

[–] schaefer 3 days ago

I don't know if you'll be interested, but there is an excellent book on the topic: Build an AI Agent (From Scratch), by Jungjun Hur and Younghee Song (Manning Publication).

By chapter four you have a minimal working codebase in python. Later chapters add out features like tool calling, planning, and reflection.

[–] crossroadsguy 4 days ago

I am thinking about it but I think forking will miss the point. I'd rather do in a way when there is a prevalence of various types of agentic/harness SDKs for people to make their own apps (aka harnesses) from.

[–] ylrd91 3 days ago

That’s what pi.dev exist for but I’m not touching it because like all of the other harnesses it’s built in JS and they’re all terrible when it comes to cpu and memory use. Maki is the only one I found the be the most efficient harness. It uses 1% cpu idle vs 20-30%.

[–] leereeves 4 days ago

What kind of hardware do you need to run a useful LLM at home? To train one?

[–] schaefer 4 days ago

> "What kind of hardware... "

At home, I mostly use openrouter.

A few bucks will realistically last you forever. I also bought a DGX Spark at launch. I've learned a ton. but it's not usually my daily driver. I do run overnight tasks on it, like "read this book and write up notes on each chapter..."

In retrospect, given the dirt cheap prices of apis and or renting hardware, buying hardware for inference was likely a mistake (but not enough of a mistake to sell it now).

[–] margalabargala 4 days ago

There are a lot of tasks I have, e.g. integration with homeassistant, that I absolutely will not trust a cloud provider for. On prem or nothing.

I'm not willing to spend thousands for those features, so my house will remain dumber than it could be until prices come down in a year or two.

[–] CamperBob2 4 days ago

Take a look at the docs for https://github.com/niko1221/strata for some ideas, particularly https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata/blob/main/docs/MODELS.md#... .

[–] raxxorraxor 3 days ago

I think building a OpenAI compatible RAG-pipeline that also perhaps includes the anthropic sdk let's you have the best of both worlds. You can build it in a way that a local agent can escalate to a frontier model when needed and also substitute prompts data that you want to hide from being "public". For example. I think that is meant by harness here.

And with some smart feedback loops, you will see that for home assistant type tasks local AI can pretty quickly fulfil all requirements. For quick responses or voice analysis you might want to start with an external provider.

Otherwise, I think for complex home automation around 24-32gb vram are a realistic house number, but more experienced users will probably need less here.

People say that tools are called by the model. That isn't entirely correct. The caller calls the tools, the model just formulates the syntax for it. So the model part can be externalised without you needing to compromise you system fully (just to the degree the tools would allow anyway)

[–] mynegation 4 days ago

Schaefer says they write their own harness, not necessarily training or running a local model.

[–] schaefer 3 days ago

Correct. I am only working on building my own harnesses.

[–] minimaxir 4 days ago

For me, I used Zed Agent with Codex as it has native integration with Zed's ACP so it's pretty convenient.

However, Anthropic is pickier about the harnesses you can use with Claude Code and I noticed discrepancies when using Zed's External Agent feature with Claude Code, so I just use the Claude app. It's fine.

[–] smlx 4 days ago

Crush is great and easy to hack on: https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush

[–] crossroadsguy 4 days ago

Is ths the one that was OpenCode? Or some story/controversy with OpenCode? You know sale, founders moving around and all…?

[–] hgoel 4 days ago

I've been pretty satisfied with OpenCode 2

[–] nozzlegear 3 days ago

Oh My Pi for an opinionated Pi.