I also quite like driving OpenCode through something like Kepler / Paseo and tools like that (with those I can still use my Anthropic Condition by Claude Code being treated similarly - as something that gets tasks dispatched to it, while the GUI I see is Kepler / Paseo).
On the desktop side, ZCode was surprisingly usable for something that came out of nowhere (I wasn't aware of it at all before trying out the GLM Coding Plan): https://zcode.z.ai/en
Last time I tried some of these, none of them had the "manual mode" that CC has, where it shows you change by change as diffs and you can edit them before accepting and moving on to the next change. I like that because if it's going off pattern I can spot it early on and guide it correctly, instead of having to review the whole completed diff at the end when it's too late. I should spend the weekend checking them out again to see if they added that but I assume with everyone going full agent mode they probably didn't.
Both Pi and OpenCode let you customize them. You tell the AI you want "something like claude code manual mode", and they'll modify your configs to do the same thing, or build an extension for you
(however, it's much faster to use Plan Mode to build a plan of what it will do, and then execute the plan in Build Mode. you can also have the AI make a script that will be executed deterministically)
The philosophy with Pi is it is minimal (but functional) out of the box and easily extensible. I'm not familiar with that feature but I would not at all be surprised if someone already coded a Pi extension that does it.
The out of box experience of omp.sh is wow imo so much nicer than Claude. Claude spends too much time being nice and gassing me
Up and omp just gets to work. It’s idk smarter like a far better system prompt and all around loop.
its a good way to check if people are insane though. would be a cool tactic for new hire evaluation, monitor them setting up dev environment. do the curl | bash, and its instafail
T3 Code has been amazing. Completely free. Really impressed with the desktop app and the mobile app experience and the way it works seamlessly has me actually accomplishing tons of stuff while I'm out on mobile that I would otherwise have to wait to come home for. First time in a while I'm actually excited to use a desktop UI instead of the terminal. Blows away the official Claude Code mobile app. I can switch between my Claude and Codex monthly subscriptions in it as well. There's a TestFlight beta SwiftUI mobile version that's so much nicer than the one in the App Store. I'm running the nightly version of the desktop app.
And this is coming from someone that's not particularly a big fan of Theo. T3 Code should get more recognition; people aren't just aware of it yet.
It’s not just bloat at this point. I run oMLX and run models locally. using Claude code on the first message dumps 40k of tokens that my laptop takes 5 mins to compute.
Piggybacking on this thread to ask my question: What are alternatives that are multiplayer (team oriented) by default? For example, I want my team to see all my sessions easily, vise versa. another way of stating: all the agents are running in a container that that any member of the team can view and interact with.
Just as a +1 anecdote. I enjoy using pi a lot. I used to h think the harness matters a lot but with the current iteration of models I am starting to sway that while it matters it’s less and less important and that CC is bloated. I did some quick tests when I switched and a task that would take $5 in tokens would be completed in $0.50 in pi. Very anecdotal and I don’t have a test framework setup to make this very official but increasingly felt like CC was spinning its wheels on the easiest of tasks.
The token cost difference is pretty interesting. I wonder how much of that is the harness itself versus how aggressively each one loops, plans, and calls tools. A proper apples-to-apples test would be really useful here.
I’ve tried a bunch of them, and I seriously do not understand these recommendations. It was a rough road and a steep hill, but right now CC is absolutely the best harness on the market, as for me, whatever top tier model is under the hood (mostly, some of them, like DeepSeek, don’t fit CC at all).
Inversely I don’t understand the praise for CC. These days it feels like bloatware. It absolutely can get the work done but when I measure on token and time use it ends up being a multiple of pi like harnesses.
CC works but for me it felt like increasingly they have zero incentive to make it a great experience. You hear folks like Boris talk about spinning up thousands of agents over night and agents chatting back and forth in GitHub issues and while I think it’s great from figuring out what the future looks like I don’t think it represents the reality of ROI today. So the folks building the tool are so disconnected I am simply not sure it’s a great experience anymore.
So is the quantitative difference in token use the only difference or do you think there's also a different qualitat? I'm on CC only and immensely happy. Very productive both at work and privately and at work I average around $250 a month which probably means nothing but it's little compared to my salary.
It's buggier for me than it has ever been before. I don't think that agentic coding always leads to such a buggy mess. I just don't think that the Anthropic front-end software team is very good at agentic coding.
It might be time for the Anthropic devs making 500k a year plus more than that in options to actually write code again? I can’t believe that humans in meat space are reviewing all that code. Maybe that’s why Claude code is feeling a bit bloated and the models are a bit lacking of late is too much of the bot is writing the bot.
Funnily enough, I would say almost the opposite. CC’s feature set is basically table stakes for an agent these days (does it have ACP yet? Very close to behind table stakes if not) and it has a lot of bloat powering that.
IMO part of it is that the underlying LLMs have gotten better enough that harnesses feel better even if they haven’t changed. I have a toy harness that barely implements the features you’d expect and it works surprisingly well. Like there’s literally nothing clever, it calls tools and that’s about it, and it still mostly does the right thing.
Why would anyone ever need ACP? I'm not trying to be an asshole. I just seriously don't understand the value proposition.
Edit: lol, I don't think ACP is even actively developed anymore. It seems to have been merged into another seemingly pointless standard with an even worse name, A2A. [0]
What the person above is suggesting:
* https://pi.dev/
* https://omp.sh/
(no personal opinions of either, links might be useful)
I think that OpenCode is nice, their CLI version is enjoyable and their desktop/web version is okay:
* https://opencode.ai/
I also quite like driving OpenCode through something like Kepler / Paseo and tools like that (with those I can still use my Anthropic Condition by Claude Code being treated similarly - as something that gets tasks dispatched to it, while the GUI I see is Kepler / Paseo).
On the desktop side, ZCode was surprisingly usable for something that came out of nowhere (I wasn't aware of it at all before trying out the GLM Coding Plan): https://zcode.z.ai/en
Last time I tried some of these, none of them had the "manual mode" that CC has, where it shows you change by change as diffs and you can edit them before accepting and moving on to the next change. I like that because if it's going off pattern I can spot it early on and guide it correctly, instead of having to review the whole completed diff at the end when it's too late. I should spend the weekend checking them out again to see if they added that but I assume with everyone going full agent mode they probably didn't.
Both Pi and OpenCode let you customize them. You tell the AI you want "something like claude code manual mode", and they'll modify your configs to do the same thing, or build an extension for you
(however, it's much faster to use Plan Mode to build a plan of what it will do, and then execute the plan in Build Mode. you can also have the AI make a script that will be executed deterministically)
The philosophy with Pi is it is minimal (but functional) out of the box and easily extensible. I'm not familiar with that feature but I would not at all be surprised if someone already coded a Pi extension that does it.
The out of box experience of omp.sh is wow imo so much nicer than Claude. Claude spends too much time being nice and gassing me Up and omp just gets to work. It’s idk smarter like a far better system prompt and all around loop.
Gonna try to find a way to use this at work.
No one in their right mind would install software using `curl | bash`
Why not? The web uses TLS, how's it different security-wise compared to a package download?
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I feel the same, which is why I only use these tools in a docker container. Because life is compromise.
its a good way to check if people are insane though. would be a cool tactic for new hire evaluation, monitor them setting up dev environment. do the curl | bash, and its instafail
1 reply →
T3 Code has been amazing. Completely free. Really impressed with the desktop app and the mobile app experience and the way it works seamlessly has me actually accomplishing tons of stuff while I'm out on mobile that I would otherwise have to wait to come home for. First time in a while I'm actually excited to use a desktop UI instead of the terminal. Blows away the official Claude Code mobile app. I can switch between my Claude and Codex monthly subscriptions in it as well. There's a TestFlight beta SwiftUI mobile version that's so much nicer than the one in the App Store. I'm running the nightly version of the desktop app.
And this is coming from someone that's not particularly a big fan of Theo. T3 Code should get more recognition; people aren't just aware of it yet.
ArtificialAnalysis puts out benchmarks for harnesses now as well, and OpenCode seems to be winning it. https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents#coding-ag...
I only found this yesterday, and it inspired me to start testing out OpenCode.
Just a warning, this is on Opus. There's not a clear harness winner. It will change depending on the models.
I'm not surprised to also see Cursor above Claude code, their harness is very good.
In what scenarios?
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Can OpenCode dispatch background subagents yet? I tried it a week ago and saw nothing. This is 99% of my workflow at this point.
Having just "asked" my opencode instance-- Yes, but it's behind an experimental flag and not necessarily feature-complete.
In the new v2 beta, yes. Major QoL upgrade, so much less sitting around waiting.
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If you like running everything in a VM and using a web browser as your UI, Shelley is very good: https://github.com/boldsoftware/shelley
It works nicely in the browsers on my tablet and phone, too.
On exe.dev you can ask it to customize itself, and it will automatically rebase your customizations when upgrading to a new release.
I think that writing your own harness is a rite of passage now, just like writing your own search engine or database, rolling your own crypto…
Anyways, please try mine!
https://github.com/deepclause/deepclause-sdk
eventually we will get to “just use postrges” stage
It’s not just bloat at this point. I run oMLX and run models locally. using Claude code on the first message dumps 40k of tokens that my laptop takes 5 mins to compute.
I’ve stopped using it completely now.
Did you build you own harness? I would miss skills and all the ecosystem if I did the same no?
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https://github.com/tontinton/maki is tackling the right issues IMO. not sure how they compare with the rest
Piggybacking on this thread to ask my question: What are alternatives that are multiplayer (team oriented) by default? For example, I want my team to see all my sessions easily, vise versa. another way of stating: all the agents are running in a container that that any member of the team can view and interact with.
Mine is a WIP for automation but has similar concepts to what you're looking for: https://github.com/rush86999/atom
thank you all! got something to tinker with this weekend
i like to challenge my assumptions and try new tools
Just as a +1 anecdote. I enjoy using pi a lot. I used to h think the harness matters a lot but with the current iteration of models I am starting to sway that while it matters it’s less and less important and that CC is bloated. I did some quick tests when I switched and a task that would take $5 in tokens would be completed in $0.50 in pi. Very anecdotal and I don’t have a test framework setup to make this very official but increasingly felt like CC was spinning its wheels on the easiest of tasks.
are ohmypi and pi related?
that's a very compelling use case, thank you
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The token cost difference is pretty interesting. I wonder how much of that is the harness itself versus how aggressively each one loops, plans, and calls tools. A proper apples-to-apples test would be really useful here.
I’ve tried a bunch of them, and I seriously do not understand these recommendations. It was a rough road and a steep hill, but right now CC is absolutely the best harness on the market, as for me, whatever top tier model is under the hood (mostly, some of them, like DeepSeek, don’t fit CC at all).
Inversely I don’t understand the praise for CC. These days it feels like bloatware. It absolutely can get the work done but when I measure on token and time use it ends up being a multiple of pi like harnesses.
CC works but for me it felt like increasingly they have zero incentive to make it a great experience. You hear folks like Boris talk about spinning up thousands of agents over night and agents chatting back and forth in GitHub issues and while I think it’s great from figuring out what the future looks like I don’t think it represents the reality of ROI today. So the folks building the tool are so disconnected I am simply not sure it’s a great experience anymore.
So is the quantitative difference in token use the only difference or do you think there's also a different qualitat? I'm on CC only and immensely happy. Very productive both at work and privately and at work I average around $250 a month which probably means nothing but it's little compared to my salary.
Is that the main concern though, cost?
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It's buggier for me than it has ever been before. I don't think that agentic coding always leads to such a buggy mess. I just don't think that the Anthropic front-end software team is very good at agentic coding.
It might be time for the Anthropic devs making 500k a year plus more than that in options to actually write code again? I can’t believe that humans in meat space are reviewing all that code. Maybe that’s why Claude code is feeling a bit bloated and the models are a bit lacking of late is too much of the bot is writing the bot.
Funnily enough, I would say almost the opposite. CC’s feature set is basically table stakes for an agent these days (does it have ACP yet? Very close to behind table stakes if not) and it has a lot of bloat powering that.
IMO part of it is that the underlying LLMs have gotten better enough that harnesses feel better even if they haven’t changed. I have a toy harness that barely implements the features you’d expect and it works surprisingly well. Like there’s literally nothing clever, it calls tools and that’s about it, and it still mostly does the right thing.
Why would anyone ever need ACP? I'm not trying to be an asshole. I just seriously don't understand the value proposition.
Edit: lol, I don't think ACP is even actively developed anymore. It seems to have been merged into another seemingly pointless standard with an even worse name, A2A. [0]
[0] https://github.com/orgs/i-am-bee/discussions/5