Comment by theturtletalks
8 hours ago
Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” Right now, it’s like an AC vs DC between Claude and ChatGPT, but once that settles, the harnesses will be the actual value providers.
And Pi is the best harness because of the amazing extension system. You can build extensions that turn Pi into a stock trader, software factory, anything. I tried switching to another harness but none have extension functionality as good as Pi.
Even if there is a new harness or agent project, I tell Pi to dig into the codebase and then make me an extension that brings that functionality into Pi. I did it with Prime Intellect’s and Deepseek’s harnesses and those are built on Pi.
> If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” (...) the harnesses will be the actual value providers.
Don't get ahead of yourself. Harnesses are not exactly rocket science and will be a commodity.
The real value providers here are the hardware, then the LLM as a distant second, and at a much larger distance the harness.
https://www.latent.space/p/attention-interface
Labs are now post-training models with Harness so that Harness now gets absorbed into the weights.
I’d say that harnesses almost by definition are the parts that you want to keep customizable. That won’t get absorbed into the weights.
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My naive intuition is that as harnesses converge on shape and models improve the first party advantage will mostly disappear.
Either part can be branded a "commodity" or a "sovereign privilege" depending on supply and demand.
Solar goes all the way up => power is commodity.
Some hyperscaler goes bankrupt => hardware is commodity.
Models get real good => output is a commodity, no profitable problems to solve anymore.
Open source models get good => models are commodity.
I was saying more the custom skills and extensions that make the harness not a commodity. Yes people will use Claude Code, Codex, or Pi but their customizations will make their harness unique and more powerful.
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> Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.”
I really though this comment was a satire ...
Its literally the same people who were making hyperbolic crypto claims a few years ago.
This entire forum is infested with shameless hype chasers and biological linkedin bots.
E = mc^2 + AI
If we take this at face value, this means AI = 0 !
In a sense they are the last frontier imo. At some point a harness will be built that can modify itself to fit the needs of the majority of people's workflows and evolve with them.
Then people will want to share and exchange their evolved harnesses. Ways will be found to modularize certain aspects to enable mixing and matching.
I’m thinking of how in cyberpunk, people are replacing their cybernetic enhancements all the time. You could alternatively bioengineer your own body towards the desired outcomes, but that’s more constrained by the trajectory your body has already taken, whereas the promise of cybernetic parts is that they are more independently replaceable. (Probably an illusion in practice, but I’m talking about the fictional ideal.)
As another analogy, monolithic software tends to quickly become hard to change significantly, whereas a plugin architecture tends to be more flexible and modular, and people can share and combine their various plugins.
Sadly, many people have bought into the cult that LLMs will lead to AGI. I guess if that is your worldview then all this babbling about new frontiers makes more sense.
They probably used an LLM to come up with this bizarre metaphor.
I find it difficult to understand people who are wildly skeptical about LLMs leading to AGI (assuming we can even agree on what that means). Consider:
- They can already reason better than many humans and are still improving all the time
- Harnesses are improving all the time
- We're already exploring things like long term memory, long term goals, and other things that humans have which LLMs traditionally lack
- An AI agent can read and reason about every piece of AI research ever published, including looking for insights that humans may have missed. A team of humans could never do this even if they dedicated their whole lives to it.
- They can design and execute experiments on a mass scale to determine what does and doesn't work
- Large AI labs have more than sufficient resources and motivation to throw at the problem, and are in fact doing this.
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Did I even mention AGI? All I’m saying is that we’re hitting a plateau with how good models are while harnesses are untapped potential. And with Pi, you can swap models like electricity companies. Yes for now, the electricity is better with some companies but this will stabilize.
And no I came up with the metaphor all on my own, send me the chat of you getting the LLM to come up with it. Why not argue based on merit instead of strawman and ad hominem attacks?
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> Sadly, many people have bought into the cult that LLMs will lead to AGI
You can never tell if the goomba opinion of the forum will agree we have reached AGI (seen that happen on a few threads lately) or will readily call that a ludicrous proposition.
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> ...once that settles, the harnesses will be the actual value providers.
The words "once that settles" are doing historic levels of work here.
No human on earth has a clear idea whether model technology will settle tomorrow or 100 years from now.
There's every reason to expect architectural breakthroughs will keep being discovered and causing nuclear blasts of forward progress.
I've never used Pi but I don't see why you can't use stock codex or claude code for the same purpose, what makes Pi special? I've built plenty of custom harnesses on top of claude code and codex using custom skills or simple markdown instructions and subagents. Never had any issues or limitations with that approach.
I do agree that harnesses are going to extend AI capabilities a lot in the next year, but after reading Pi's page I don't see anything that makes it particularly special in terms of functionality, other than being more provider-agnostic.
For one you can ask Pi to create a TUI extension, so along with the agent interface you can add whatever custom TUI you need, such as portfolio stock tickers, alerts, whatever you want.
Many of my harnesses eventually turn into customized UIs around the chat interface.
Codex and Claude historically had more bloat in their system prompt and tools. Pi is minimal by design so more adaptable. But to be fair Claude Code is moving in the Pi direction with a small system prompt.
Author here. I think our website could be much clearer - but Pi is fundamentally easier to mold than other harnesses. It’s not magic but it strikes the balance well of letting you shape it extensively without letting you break it.
A harness is the bottom layer of a pie that gets fed into the model. In my project, I count 7 more layers on top of it https://replicated.live/blog/wiki They all affect consistency, coherence, token efficiency. Probably we need some broader term. Like "information architecture", "knowledge architecture"? It's not just shoveling Markdown to nvidias, after all.
If LLMs are oxen, harnesses are... the harnesses
Yeah. This is pretty clearly the origin of the usage.
The harness facilitates the work animal doing work for you.
Not climbing harnesses to keep you safe.
This is a plug, but relevant. I recently added a 'build native tools on the fly' functionality to Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac) that works like:
1. You can use the '/new-tool' and tell what kind of tool you want (including whether it should be task-scoped, workspace-scoped, or global), the model builds it, the harness runs validation and other tests until the tool is ready
2. The model decides that in such and such task, it would be helpful to have a tool like this, it can build a task-scoped tool.
In either scenario, the tool catalog is rebuilt, and the new tool is instantly available in the next turn.
This type of modification of the harness on the fly to fit the need is the future. The only thing left after that is the mobile front. I think static app store type software as we know it is a thing of the past. You'll only ever need one self modifying app.
Pi's most popular extensions, by download count:
https://pi.dev/packages?type=extension
Kinda ironic that the most popular extensions turn pi back into claude.
I don't think so.
What I can see is a world where we end up with a Chromium-shaped harness, a fully featured standard implementation everyone builds against, because doing every single thing yourself would be crazy.
The antithesis to Pi, if you will.
I disagree with this. Unlike training models (which requires huge compute), harness development is available to anyone with an editor and ideas. That means that solo devs and small startups can still make meaningful progress.
Also, having only a "standard implementation" makes no sense for a harness. A standard implementation would need to try to be as good as possible at all things. But you'd often want a specialised harness designed for exactly your use case.
I don't see us tinkering with Pi in 5 years.
Some standard solution will emerge, which will be amplified by models being trained specifically to work with it.
What did you bring over from prime-agent? (I use prime-agent as my daily since it launched)
I primarily like how it manages sessions, and how agents can easily reference other sessions.
Something like this since Prime Intellect uses RLM under the hood:
https://github.com/manojlds/pi-rlm
I want to move from Claude Desktop to Pi, but I found it a little unfriendly. Any tips to set it up?
Pi doesn’t have a UI like Claude Desktop. It also doesn’t work with the Claude subscription, only API key and pricing.
So if you do want to use it, use the Codex sub. Once you install it, run Pi and /login and you’ll get login with ChatGPT. From there, Pi can tweak it’s settings if you ask. Check out their extensions (or ask Pi) and that will take you most of the way there.
What hiccups were you having?
> It also doesn’t work with the Claude subscription, only API key and pricing.
Not out of the box, but you can add agent sdk. I'm not sure how great the results will be though.
I haven’t tried it myself yet but I’m under the impression that Hermes Agent might be what you’re looking for?
Can you be more specific regarding unfriendliness?
Please tell me this is satire, it reads like straight from the depths of LinkedIn where a while loop is seen as the second coming…
Are human HN commenters now starting to speak in a dialect of Claudish?
what have you built other than a harness?
I built a software factory and am now building a stock trader using opencandle extension[0] and a custom extension. For inspiration for how to tweak Pi, check out OMP, Prime Intellect, and Deepseek harnesses.
0. https://github.com/Kahtaf/OpenCandle
> Prime Intellect
looking at the website. i can't really tell if they have benchmarks and measuremnts on how all that improves capablities over just using regular agent withtout all that
Both Claude and codex are unappealing, crap, generic agents that you have 0 control over.
Don't understand what people see in them.
How does Pi compare to vscode? Admittedly that is the only “agent/harness” I’ve ever used.
The harness is just another codebase for the model to write and optimize. The value is still very much in the model.
i think its the opposite. claude code apparently removed hundreds of lines of system prompt because its not relavent anymore with newer models.
also i think its hard to build general harnesses if they were trained on specific harness architecture.
Yes but Pi has had a minimal system prompt since inception. Skills and Pi extensions let you make a hyper specific harness for specific use cases. For general conversation, harnesses are overkill most times.
There’s evidence of harnesses making a smaller, weaker model perform better than SOTA and some benchmarks ban harnesses because it becomes too easy.
All agentic editors/frameworks have skills and extensions and plugins?