Comment by reacharavindh
4 hours ago
I’ve been using GPT models via hax[1], a bare bones harness with minimal tools on my system and have the models rely on bash for the most part the last few months. It’s been a breath of fresh air amidst all these overengineered harnesses.
If I need special actions, I just make them CLI tools on my Mac and tell the AI model that such a tool exists(via a single line in its system prompt) and that’s it. It’s been very nice.
[1] - https://usehax.dev/
No affiliation whatsoever. Just a happy user.
You seem to care, so I wanna point out a semantic nit; "such a tool exists" could be interpreted as a harness provided tool, rather than a command line tool. (Edit, on a re-read its pretty obvious you mean cli tool, but keeping this statment here as im sure it'll open someone's eyes to the difference)
I've gotta give hax a go, as a pi user who came on-board due to the no frills direction pi takes. I say takes rather than took, because regardless of the (heated) discussion surrounding mcp and code mode support, I cannot fight the numbers- augmenting the harness provided tools is a notable boost to execution round trip performance.
I may need to take a second look at Pi again if it has any niceties like that notable boost in round trip performance compared to hax.
I mostly stuck around with Hax because of a few design choices. The sessions are merely plain text files indexed by a dirpath slug. This means I can just start a hax session in that directory and expect sessions history to be available in any model.. (I occasionally dabble in GLM for security checks, Gemini for writing stuff, Deepseek for tightly scoped tests etc).