Comment by justech
14 hours ago
If you're looking for Claude Code alternatives, I would first suggest looking into pi.dev or opencode for your harness. And then for models, you can choose from OpenCode Go (IMO most cost effect at this moment), OpenRouter, or direct from DeepSeek. Better if you go the Kimi route IMO and just buy a subscription from kimi.com
I’m going to throw my harness in the ring: https://codeberg.org/mlow/lmcli
Looks interesting. Does it offer anything special that pi.dev or opencode does not?
Probably not, `lmcli` is very lean. I would consider it a slightly lower-level tool than either pi.dev or opencode. E.g. there is no built-in coding agent, but it's easy to build one up in the config with your own prompt (or use the example).
It's proven useful for me, and I figure others might appreciate how light of a shim it is between you and the models.
I liked pi.dev but why is registering endpoints and models not as simple as possible ? Or am i missing something ? I always have to fiddle with the config file.
Editing config files is not necessary. Just do /login from your session, choose your provider, and there you go.
agreed. OpenCode is a strong base, and with a couple modifications it can become a very effective harness. my sideproject mouse.dev I’ve been combining parts from OpenCode, Claude Code, and Hermes to build a cloud agent architecture that works well from mobile.
> OpenCode is a strong base, and with a couple modifications it can become a very effective harness.
I personally didn't find it to be competitve with Claude Code as a harness. Can I ask how you modified it to perform better?
I haven’t run formal evals but i improved the experience for my own needs and it feels noticeably better with these modifications.
-Claude-style subagents -an MCP layer for higher-level tools -Cursor-style control plane modes like Ask, Plan, Debug, and Build.
The MCP layer lets the harness use things like GitHub file/code read, PR creation, web search/fetch, structured user questions, plan-mode switching, user skills, and subagents.
So the improvement is mostly from better ui/ux orchestration and tool access. There's some things from hermes that are interesting as well.
Most of my focus has been on applying this stack to sandboxed cloud agents so you can properly code and work from mobile devices.
I can't definitively say that the stack is better or worse than Claude code, more just tuned for my use case I guess.
I'm a Claude Code Web fan and a rather heavy user. So I was interested in your product. However, I couldn't find an answer on the website. What parts did you find so good that you ported them?
Nothing groundbreaking but i'll do a blog writeup on the architecture if it would be helpful for people. My focus has been on mobile.
The main pieces I've integrated for mouse.dev inspired by claude/cursor was plan mode, agent questions, subagents, pre/post hooks, context compaction, repo-local skills, and permission modes. So mostly tools like enter_plan_mode, ask_user_question, and spawn_subagent, plus .mouse/skills and .mouse/plans.
One nice feature is continuity. If you’re working on desktop and save a plan to .mouse/plans, you can pick it up later on mobile with cloud agents, or do the reverse. You can plan something from your phone, then when you’re back at your desk, review it/build it. That was my initial goal with this project because I've found the plan act loop so helpful.
Mouse Cloud Agents is mostly an OpenCode-based harness, but everything routes through our MCP/event system so it’s mobile-first and provider-agnostic.
I intentionally skipped a lot of IDE and Claude Code style desktop features. The bet is that this new style of coding is becoming less “edit files in an IDE” and more steer a capable coding chatbot.
Would love to hear from anyone reading that's iterating on harness architecture, it's been really fun to work on.
How does the kimi subscription compare to Codex and Claude Code in terms of how much mileage you get for the pricing? I mean, I see the prices but not sure how usage that buys.
Another very cost-effective option is Ollama Cloud. In a month of use, I only hit the 5-hour limit once, when I ran 8 agents simultaneously for 2 hours.
for me its unbearably slow - especially with deepseek v4 pro. Is that just myself? I literally signed up and canceled again, because for one prompt I needed around 5 minutes to get 600 tokens back (via ollama launch claude --mode ...)
On which tier?
definitely worth it - have both ollama cloud, opencode and hermes running to test them all out, working great so far.
> I would first suggest looking into pi.dev
Looked into this one. Thought it was suspicious that it only had 7 open issues on github. Turns out they have a bot that auto-closes every single issue just because.
I honestly have no words.
Their process is outlined here: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.m...
> Maintainers review auto-closed issues daily and reopen worthwhile ones. Issues that do not meet the quality bar below will not be reopened or receive a reply.
Seems like not an unreasonable way to deal with the problem of large numbers of low quality issues being submitted.
If that process actually happens then there’s absolutely no reason not to have the reviewing maintainer close it after review instead. The only reasonable conclusion is that documented process is aspirational at best and vibed itself at worst.
Sounds like a perfect way to agitate the community going against the established culture like that.
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But how is it any different from keeping them open?
Like if they are going to sort through all the issues eventually (like they claim), why not just close the ones that are not worthy when they get to them instead of closing all by default?
Is it just so that the project doesnt have open issues on its github page? But they are open issues in reality because the maintainer will eventually go through them?
Nothing is "unreasonable" in the sense that an open source project should have the right to do what it wants with its rules but its definitely a weird stance.
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The maintainer, Mario, sometimes declares the repo is on an “issue holiday” where issues are auto closed. This particular holiday is because there is a big refactor coming up. In non holiday periods issues can be reported as normal.
They have a pretty decent explanation.
https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.m...
"Decent" is doing some work. This is going beyond any norms I've encountered in OSS to close issues by default via a LLM or an "issue holiday".
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The idea is for it to he extremely minimal which strikes me as a very opinionated stance, and not opinions I agree with.
It's a very interesting project. Many popular open source projects are inundated with poor quality issues and prs, hence the defences they are starting to erect.
>If you're looking for Claude Code alternatives, I would first suggest looking into pi.dev or opencode for your harness.
While those are nice, Claude Code has the largest amount of plugins and skills I want to use.
Aren't skills just literal plaintext files? Why not just copy them?
Yes, they are .md files but they can rely on builtin behaviors in the harness or on plugins.