Comment by hbarka
10 hours ago
Harness engineering is a moat. There’s user loyalty and reliance on the chassis that Claude is on, for example, just like there’s more market share by MacOS+WindowsOS over Linux Open Source.
10 hours ago
Harness engineering is a moat. There’s user loyalty and reliance on the chassis that Claude is on, for example, just like there’s more market share by MacOS+WindowsOS over Linux Open Source.
I regularly switch between codex and Claude in the same sessions. I’d throw in other models if I could.
Data governance and enterprise sales is a moat. The harnesses aren’t.
I thought so too.
But 1) people use other models with that same harness. 2) I moved on from Claude Code and all the features I cared for up and running in less than a couple days. Without even looking for available plugins or extensions.
> Harness engineering is a moat.
I mean, if that’s the case, then Anthropic themselves are currently actively filling in that moat with nice, solid, walkable dirt. Claude Code may have been a moat 6 months ago but these days you’ll want to replace the “m” with a “bl”.
It's absolutely NOT a moat. Making a harness is the EASY part.
If you had said "marketing is a moat" then yes, I would say you were right. But creating a harness equal to or better than Claude Code is trivial. The CC harness is actually shit. There are tons of open-source harnesses than work better than CC while using Opus via OpenRouter.
The industry on tooling have been very much moving in direction of "plug the AI of your choosing" for a while now, and given how much Anthropic fights the 3rd party tools they are definitely afraid to be left in the dust.
> just like there’s more market share by MacOS+WindowsOS over Linux Open Source.
It's hard to change OS. It's not hard to jump from one AI tool to another