Comment by umvi
7 hours ago
Can't wait until we get really well designed harnesses written in a compiled language that doesn't bloat my computer. Will probably have to be written by a company other than OpenAI because codex is like the exact opposite of everything I just listed
Codex is written in rust, fyi... Not that I disagree.
Oh, I haven't been keeping up. I assumed it was still TS since it prompts me to run npm all the time.
They just use npm as a binary delivery mechanism, for whatever reason (I guess they expect all their users to have npm?)
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Which generates unnecessarily huge binaries.
It's because they statically linked it, and probably rely on a trillion pointless crates (as is standard in Rust development). A good statically linked harness can easily be ~5MB MAX
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Found this one: https://usehax.dev/
Anyone experiences with it?
Yeah, using it a bunch with local LLMs. It's fast (small system prompt), focused on the basics, made around simple choices, and possibility to call it in scripts.
So far I have very positive experiences, the results are generally better (and not just faster) than in other harnesses with the same models. I've done the same (user) prompts for tasks in a range of them, and compare the outcome to eval between them. Simple (harness) beats complicated one many times. I do wish it could use MCP though, but not as often as I think, and CLI tool usage often compensates on this front with little extra effort)
That is now my usuall go-to harness for things usually. Still figuring out the edges though (when we get off the happy path, like models reaching their max context, or such...)
It's very light, recommed you try it out, and see if it fits your toolbox.
it's okay.
it's minimal and somewhat opinionated, not integrated well with memory subsystems (although that's kind of the point)
my only real criticism is that last I played with it it deals with slow provider responses very poorly , so lots of locally hosted llms require a lot of tuning to get it to handle streaming/non-streaming/timers well.
way less minimal (but still pretty minimal) I prefer Pi; but different markets I think.
hax fit my openbsd laptop well, espescially since Pi and related derivatives are kind of un-spokenly incompatible with the BSDs.
(author passing by) Could you please report the issues you've experienced on the repo? I did quite a bit of testing myself on local models (Qwen, Ornith, Gemma, Muse Glimmer) with llama.cpp, and they all worked fine. Details would be helpful.
Also one brief note for Codex users specifically. hax can work out-of-the-box as codex-cli drop-in replacement (since it can use the already authenticated codex token), so it's super easy to try it - basically it will be a zero-config experience.
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Just write your own harness. Ironically Codex/Claude are both abysmal.
How do you even write a harness that can use a Claude subscription? I thought it was not allowed by Anthropic's ToS and can get you banned?
Amp recently achieved it. Apparently it's permitted as long as you use the Claude Agent SDK. https://ampcode.com/news/use-your-claude-plan
It's trivial to bypass this by tweaking the system prompt in other harnesses. They use string matching and a blacklist.
https://x.com/FlorianKluge/status/2041855675295318039
(Whether that's against the ToS is not clear.)
That’s a different discussion.
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If you're using the sub, only OpenAI (via the OAuth token) is viable. Claude is API_KEY only
It's allowed, but you get bumped to per token pricing.
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I did, and the weird things you have to do to make work at least decent. I’ve been doing evals and I got some things better than opencode but not as good as pi. Though my goal is to optimize for a browser and browser based llm so it can create stuff in a web container or at least generate ui by requesting json schema (a2ui style).
Omp
They're not made of fairy dust; you can build your own.