Comment by wolttam
3 hours ago
I used Claude Code for a month because my boss gifted me a sub and wanted me to try it.
I used that month to complete a work project and then beef up my personal harness so I'd never have to deal with Anthropic (and these sorts of shenanigans) again.
Yes, this is actually "funny" that Anthropic feels the need to build such intrusive features into Claude Code, when anybody can build a (basic) Claude Code alternative. And the Chinese labs are certainly not "anybody". One may wonder what Anthropic really tries to achieve aside from awful publicity.
How do people build something like a personal harness? Are there tools for that or is it done from scratch?
I like this tutorial for an agent in 50 lines:
http://minimal-agent.com/
And if you add one additional while loop, for user input, you can actually use it! :)
https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/5461a662ef8a7ee0a5eb7778c8...
Build it from scratch. Understanding fundamentals of how agentic coding harnesses is a must though if you gonna go that route. I think everyone should take time and learn these things, maybe reverse engineer Codex Cli or something like that as a starter. That info is very valuable in this day and age.
Can you say more about Codex? I'm using GPT-5.5 in my own harness and it's not liking it very well, so I'm thinking I ought to make it more Codexy so it's more ergonomic for it. (edit format, tool calls etc.) But haven't gotten around to it yet.
Not the comment author, but I use pi and customize it with my own extensions. Pi automatically tells models how to customize itself, so it's a pretty easy process.
I started mine from scratch in 2023 because I wanted to use LLMs from a terminal and there was nothing else compelling at the time (nowadays there is pi and opencode)
Harnesses are/can be incredibly simple things, not much more than a HTTP client that renders things in a way that suites your taste.
It’s not that difficult, it’s just a system prompt and a set of basic file edit/bash/etc tools.
Me, personally, I didn’t build it from scratch but I ported original CC from published sources into Python and extended it to match my own requirements.
Are you using it with Claude? They only allow their own harness with the subs right? (And per-token billing is like 10x more expensive?)
Here is a video I made explaining it from absolute basics:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_AgKuFGvJfI
And the repo:
https://github.com/abtinf/homunctor
I hope you've already invalidated that bearer token :-P
Building something like this is the todo list of agents.
I found this one easy to understand:
https://ampcode.com/notes/how-to-build-an-agent
The real question is when do you transition from building it with codex/CC to the harness itself.
Lots of ways, it's a good exercise that you will learn a lot doing. Might make you cynical w.r.t. big ai harnesses
I used ADK, Dagger, and a VS Code extension for mine. Currently using opencode though.
Why use a personal harness?
You have to pay API pricing, which is far more costly.
I'd either switch to GLM wholesale or just continue to use Opus within Claude Code as the blessed, subsidized path.
I would guess it is to avoid model lock-in.
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I use GLM in my custom harness. It completes the same tasks at the same level of quality, except 8x faster and 8x cheaper. (Same goes for GPT!)
I'm not sure how that's possible. I expected to get increased correctness for that order of magnitude (something something test-time compute!) but I am not getting it.
The issue is that using Claude Code is an easy compromise for most to make, when you get to use the models 10x cheaper than through API pricing with a custom harness.
The cheap tokens are the product.
Which is why my vibeslop harness supports `claude -p` as one of its backends.
If that ain't getting steganographically tagged...
What models are you using? Aren’t you still dealing with some provider even if you are not using their binary
I self-host DeepSeek V4 Flash on 2 DGX Sparks (approx. $10k)
I expect DeepSeek V4 Flash (or an equivalently sized model) to reach parity with GLM 5.2 some time this year (this based on DeepSeek V4 Flash launching at GLM 5.0 parity[0], and GLM 5.2 being freely available to distill from)
GLM 5.2 is within spitting distance of Opus 4.8 and is at least as good as Opus 4.6[1] which some devs were willing to spend hundreds to single-digit thousands of dollars a month for a few months ago.
[0]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/deepseek-v4...
[1]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/claude-opus...
How fast is it?
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Given the Anthropic shenanigans, do you trust the personal harness code it wrote for you?
It did not write it for me, I used it to add a feature I wanted. It's a pretty small and understandable codebase, in fact :)
Does anyone know what’s gone wrong with Anthropic?
They used to be a decently credible company with not-too-shady behaviour...
I hope they can actually regain some credibility…
I don't think many people care that they are trying to detect resellers and distillation.
It also doesn't seem very consistent to fixate on that while sending Anthropic everything about you via your day to day prompts, every line of the projects and environments you're working on at work, etc.
Their credibility comes from having one of the best models.
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When have they ever been credible? They have always been shady with their talk of safety, Dario was the one who wrote back in 2019 that GPT 2 was too dangerous to release.
Their philosophy is what's gone wrong.
It has some good effects on the their models, like Claude seeking cooperation first. But the people behind the company have a typical "unconstrained" (in the Sowell vision sense) perspective that assumes that they know better, so they are righteous for attempting to control things (users, paying customers, their model outputs, their tool chain, the supposed deity they assume they will produce... etc.)
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They've only been around 5 years and have grown tremendously during that time. There's no stable reputation you can rely on yet.
They just show their true face. You’ve been lied all this time. They were never “good”.
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Enshitification. Too big to.. upset the govt.
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Phased rollouts are a triggering microagression for some.