Well, I'd love to use an open-source harness! My issue is that Opus 5.5 / Fable 5.1 has been the best model for me to work with, and it's way cheaper to use it with the subscription to Claude Code Max. I won't pay more just to use an open-source harness. I'd rather just wait it out and stay on Claude Code not having to constantly jump around / switch tools as the industry matures.
You can use your claude subscription just fine in open harnesses!
I make one (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler) and it'll auto-detect and use your claude CLI. I use that claude plan for 90% of my work, plus a bit of GPT, I just prefer to do it inside a nicer, less locked-in environment than claude.
There's really no moat around proprietary closed harnesses, it's trivial to jump between them, but people need to be aware that it's possible!
Pi can utilize Claude or GPT subscriptions and they work wonderfully. You can have both subscriptions logged in and write your own tools to route to the model that works best in every scenario. I have access to both pro level subscriptions for work and a large credit count for api calls for Claude. I use all 3 with JEV as my router with a local model for context management and compaction. my token usage has gone down to a point where I rarely even use api calls. I would recommend oh-mi-pi for anyone who wants to get started with using an open source harness as it has very good memory and context management tools that ship with it and are extremely easy to set up.
You don't have to pay more - I wouldn't switch to an open source harness on a whim, but your harness/cheaper agents can always call Claude Code headlessly.
1. A lot of people already have Claude Code set up, and it's easier to keep using that than to install something new.
2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.
3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.
4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.
5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.
[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?
A lot of the extant harnesses are built around interaction, which adds a bunch of complexity.
Eg an agent that only runs off a webhook trigger doesn’t have a use for all the UI stuff Pi does (and you may not want the local state like Pi does by default).
I’m still sort of with you, I’d generally do ACP to an open source agent. You do get much finer grained control if you use one of these agent SDKs (there’s a bajillion of these as well).
I havent switched to a 3rd party harness yet so quick question for anyone, does the claude code or codex harness not give the models a significant improvement in their ability? Or does prompting a model on openrouter vs claude code yield the same result?
There's just not really any features in an open-source harness that blow my mind enough to move off the highly-subsidized claude code subscription. I type in instructions and it spits out code. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the more complex features being floated are productivity theater.
Why would you not just build your own harness in October 2026? Gateway, memory, tool calls, LLM api - the basics are pretty simple to get started and get to a point where your harness can be self-improving to add any new features that you need.
Claude Code wont let me use their sub with one as far as I remember. So I'm stuck with their convoluted TUI. It does what I need, and when it doesn't I just build tools that Claude consumes. The new "Artifacts" feature has helped a bit though.
oh-my-pi works great with Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI subscriptions. Being able to quickly to switch between models without changing your workflow is such a joy - for me at least.
OpenCode + DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Uncensored on Venice AI is truly incredible. Granted, I have it also drive an interactive claude code session in tmux and just do everything Claude Code refuses to. But, it just gets shit done. Kind of what makes Instinct so powerful, don't tell me you won't do something, just get it done.
I wish you would explain your reasoning instead of preemptively telling people they don't know what they're talking about. Then I might actually learn something.
This is my goto SDK, it comes in multiple languages too. I'm going to be wrapping the Go ADK in CUE Nov/Dec, along with Dagger, and rebuild my personal harness from scratch which I worked on last Nov/Dec.
Does anyone even use Cursor still? I loved it during the tab era but ever since they tried to catch up to agentic workflows, the product experience got worse and worse
I think their agentic cloud stuff is their best product right now. This makes sense to me. We still have subs because its nice to have something that works when Claude doesn't, it was already approved, and Composer actually is a decent value. I will sometimes use the cloud agent to put up a PR when I'm not at my computer and I remember it exists.
So a few people started using grok bot and I'll probably regret that some day, but honestly the deployment model they have here for custom agents is kind of appealing to me, much more than BigLang.
SpaceX-stans (god i can't believe i just typed that) use it, there's a whole subculture grokking (heinlein is turning in his grave) their way towards the same vibe coded nonsense as the rest of us.
I see people spending so much time creating "workflow" skills that have no benchmark whatsoever to prove they are any more effective than plain one sentence prompts.
This takes me back to the era of object oriented programming and UML diagrams. More time was spent framing the solution than implementing it. Is there maybe one more design pattern that could be applied? And when the time to implement came, all those diagrams were mostly in the way. But doing it was fun, since it allowed you to focus on the fun, big picture and skip the nitty gritty details that were actually hard to solve.
I feel like people are going down that slippery slope with harnesses and skills and what not. With the right prompt, and with the right model, and with a sprinkle of magic, the solution will emerge. Oh, it didn't? Let's see if there's a new model available, or if someone has come up with a new clever skill or something. Maybe then... Because actually solving annoying problems is not fun, even less so now that the code is a black box only the LLM can understand.
This is so frustrating to me. Ever heard of the planner agent reviewer agent and the tester agent framework?
I'm not sure if that's what you mean but I know many that are making their own flow like this and think that this brings in a higher level of performance..
Gotta justify that $160k/yr salary somehow I guess, and if the AI is writing all the code you used to write and your job is now to manage the AI, what better way to spend the days than making new AI tools and workflows and markdown files all day
why do we even care, this is a clear, lets move away from `people pushing software to git` to `agent is pushing software, agentic or not , to somehwere, db, git, or something else` human does involved in this unless there is a problem. JS or Python, is really not essential in this case, maybe it's WASM built from rust. it's not for human.
Cursor moving this direction, is a prep work where human no longer command that much , hence the usage will drop. e.g. their core product is vulnerable. Software factories, is the ultimate game over for our industry.
Its not bad, just most of them are created by corpos to sell slop to the masses. AI companies suck and you know it. Its not about good software, its about making as much money as possible before the hype train dies.
I have so many use cases for this. I just hope that we'll get a standard like https://www.openresponses.org/, because the idea of coupling an app to a particular vendor doesn't seem appealing at all, especially since it seems that the functionalities they offer are more or less the same. (I'm thinking about the OpenAI's Agent API and Anthropic's Agent SDK as "alternatives.)
Honest question, why shouldn't any agent SDK's API simply be a PROMPT.md with a runtime that runs the LLM with tools; why do you need excessive abstractions over that like langchain offers?
My 2c is that agents are not at the level where companies can easily just have unconstrained LLM with tools and let it be. Different parts of the workflow can have different models, different tools, different constraints, guardrails, etc.
The entrypoint still has to come from somewhere, and it's much more convenient to be able to explain the security and legal teams how data is handled, what is logged, how you can have control over a scenario where the agent does something unexpected.
Sure, for a personal project that could be enough, but we all know those companies target enterprise customers, and you would be surprised how little adoption there is when it comes to workflow automation due to the lack of controls.
This "runtime" is what you are building with LangChain.. A harness like claude code/codex etc is general purpose and its env is a shell + tools.
But with a custom runtime (basically a loop where we ask llm what to do next), we can give it specific tools which we define in code. This can help with things like authorization since, well its custom code you own.. so the runtime gets the tools scoped to the users permissions etc.
We’ve officially hit the JS framework churn phase of AI tooling.
Why would you not use an open-source harness in October 2026? I am generally curious - what is the alpha?
Well, I'd love to use an open-source harness! My issue is that Opus 5.5 / Fable 5.1 has been the best model for me to work with, and it's way cheaper to use it with the subscription to Claude Code Max. I won't pay more just to use an open-source harness. I'd rather just wait it out and stay on Claude Code not having to constantly jump around / switch tools as the industry matures.
You can use your claude subscription just fine in open harnesses!
I make one (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler) and it'll auto-detect and use your claude CLI. I use that claude plan for 90% of my work, plus a bit of GPT, I just prefer to do it inside a nicer, less locked-in environment than claude.
There's really no moat around proprietary closed harnesses, it's trivial to jump between them, but people need to be aware that it's possible!
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Pi can utilize Claude or GPT subscriptions and they work wonderfully. You can have both subscriptions logged in and write your own tools to route to the model that works best in every scenario. I have access to both pro level subscriptions for work and a large credit count for api calls for Claude. I use all 3 with JEV as my router with a local model for context management and compaction. my token usage has gone down to a point where I rarely even use api calls. I would recommend oh-mi-pi for anyone who wants to get started with using an open source harness as it has very good memory and context management tools that ship with it and are extremely easy to set up.
You don't have to pay more - I wouldn't switch to an open source harness on a whim, but your harness/cheaper agents can always call Claude Code headlessly.
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1. A lot of people already have Claude Code set up, and it's easier to keep using that than to install something new.
2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.
3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.
4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.
5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.
[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?
>4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.
I thought this was pretty much well established that all of the labs have model - harness pairings for exactly this reason
Whale Paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00196
EMNLP talk from like 2 weeks ago https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2207/
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You realize this is about Cursor, not Claude Code?
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A lot of the extant harnesses are built around interaction, which adds a bunch of complexity.
Eg an agent that only runs off a webhook trigger doesn’t have a use for all the UI stuff Pi does (and you may not want the local state like Pi does by default).
I’m still sort of with you, I’d generally do ACP to an open source agent. You do get much finer grained control if you use one of these agent SDKs (there’s a bajillion of these as well).
I havent switched to a 3rd party harness yet so quick question for anyone, does the claude code or codex harness not give the models a significant improvement in their ability? Or does prompting a model on openrouter vs claude code yield the same result?
There's just not really any features in an open-source harness that blow my mind enough to move off the highly-subsidized claude code subscription. I type in instructions and it spits out code. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the more complex features being floated are productivity theater.
Why would you not just build your own harness in October 2026? Gateway, memory, tool calls, LLM api - the basics are pretty simple to get started and get to a point where your harness can be self-improving to add any new features that you need.
Claude Code wont let me use their sub with one as far as I remember. So I'm stuck with their convoluted TUI. It does what I need, and when it doesn't I just build tools that Claude consumes. The new "Artifacts" feature has helped a bit though.
You can. Anthropic documents it: the Agent SDK and claude -p work signed in with your Claude plan and draw from your normal subscription limits. https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
We build a desktop app on top of the SDK, so I've spent a lot of time on that page.
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It's the one features that keeps me using claude, it's simply convenient.
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oh-my-pi works great with Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI subscriptions. Being able to quickly to switch between models without changing your workflow is such a joy - for me at least.
Cheaper tokens in the $200 subscription.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Pi etc you're paying the full API price.
Only if you use Claude via /login in pi... in which case
;)
You're wrong.
better discounts when compare with API cost, and frontier lab harnesses and models are tuned to each other
A main criteria in 2026 should be whether the harness gives you access to all model families for just the harness author's models.
More and more harnesses are headed this way, there are two notable holdouts.
If you tell me I should OpenCode over Claude Code in October 2026 - then you have no idea what you are talking about.
OpenCode + DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Uncensored on Venice AI is truly incredible. Granted, I have it also drive an interactive claude code session in tmux and just do everything Claude Code refuses to. But, it just gets shit done. Kind of what makes Instinct so powerful, don't tell me you won't do something, just get it done.
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I wish you would explain your reasoning instead of preemptively telling people they don't know what they're talking about. Then I might actually learn something.
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What if I'm trying to bypass the security monitor built-into CC?
What's your reasoning? What makes Claude Code better? Genuinely curious to learn.
say more, what do you think CC does better?
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What about an AgentFactoryFactory? That would increase Cursor's valuation from $60 to $120 billion.
An IQ too large to measure
Open AI and Anthropic already have "Agent SDK" brands. Vercel is "AI SDK". I wish folks would come up with some good names for new projects.
And Google has ADK (Agent Development Kit)
This is my goto SDK, it comes in multiple languages too. I'm going to be wrapping the Go ADK in CUE Nov/Dec, along with Dagger, and rebuild my personal harness from scratch which I worked on last Nov/Dec.
ADK has a graph/workflow concept too: https://adk.dev/graphs/
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Not to be confused with ACP (Agent Client Protocol).
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Does anyone even use Cursor still? I loved it during the tab era but ever since they tried to catch up to agentic workflows, the product experience got worse and worse
I think their agentic cloud stuff is their best product right now. This makes sense to me. We still have subs because its nice to have something that works when Claude doesn't, it was already approved, and Composer actually is a decent value. I will sometimes use the cloud agent to put up a PR when I'm not at my computer and I remember it exists.
So a few people started using grok bot and I'll probably regret that some day, but honestly the deployment model they have here for custom agents is kind of appealing to me, much more than BigLang.
why is it the best? what's the differentiation to Devin?
SpaceX-stans (god i can't believe i just typed that) use it, there's a whole subculture grokking (heinlein is turning in his grave) their way towards the same vibe coded nonsense as the rest of us.
I’ve been using Vercel’s Eve it’s really lovely for an agent that lives on a server somewhere (no affiliation)
In 2026, the wheel that keeps getting reinvented is the agent harness.
If you are on onstagram 99% of posts are people shilling skills where you need to subscribe to some service. To which they are an affiliate.
And a lot of the apps are the same thing.
It's going to be a race to the bottom.
I'm starting to think that the LLMs ecosystem is going in the JS ecosystem direction, endless technologies with little to no adaption.
Literally everyday there is a new tool and the tools released last week are deprecated.
I see people spending so much time creating "workflow" skills that have no benchmark whatsoever to prove they are any more effective than plain one sentence prompts.
This takes me back to the era of object oriented programming and UML diagrams. More time was spent framing the solution than implementing it. Is there maybe one more design pattern that could be applied? And when the time to implement came, all those diagrams were mostly in the way. But doing it was fun, since it allowed you to focus on the fun, big picture and skip the nitty gritty details that were actually hard to solve.
I feel like people are going down that slippery slope with harnesses and skills and what not. With the right prompt, and with the right model, and with a sprinkle of magic, the solution will emerge. Oh, it didn't? Let's see if there's a new model available, or if someone has come up with a new clever skill or something. Maybe then... Because actually solving annoying problems is not fun, even less so now that the code is a black box only the LLM can understand.
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This 1000x.
At the same time, the lack of this makes it then very easy for me to tune out harness noise.
It reminds me of people customizing their nvim configs all day, thinking they're being productive but not getting all that much done.
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This is so frustrating to me. Ever heard of the planner agent reviewer agent and the tester agent framework?
I'm not sure if that's what you mean but I know many that are making their own flow like this and think that this brings in a higher level of performance..
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Gotta justify that $160k/yr salary somehow I guess, and if the AI is writing all the code you used to write and your job is now to manage the AI, what better way to spend the days than making new AI tools and workflows and markdown files all day
That's the whole point with AI. It's consumerism applied to software... And it sucks
why do we even care, this is a clear, lets move away from `people pushing software to git` to `agent is pushing software, agentic or not , to somehwere, db, git, or something else` human does involved in this unless there is a problem. JS or Python, is really not essential in this case, maybe it's WASM built from rust. it's not for human.
Cursor moving this direction, is a prep work where human no longer command that much , hence the usage will drop. e.g. their core product is vulnerable. Software factories, is the ultimate game over for our industry.
I attribute this to "it's so new and we don't know what the right answer is yet", but you may very well be right
> endless technologies with little to no adaption.
I think the difference is that those endless technologies will probably be used by other agents without people's explicit knowledge.
I don't think I'll ever understand this argument. Especially from purported "hackers."
Why is a large number of ideas, technologies, frameworks, etc. bad?
Hackers hate frameworks because they hide the underlying truth of a system.
'coz it's pointless if you can get the same results without them.
Its not bad, just most of them are created by corpos to sell slop to the masses. AI companies suck and you know it. Its not about good software, its about making as much money as possible before the hype train dies.
I have so many use cases for this. I just hope that we'll get a standard like https://www.openresponses.org/, because the idea of coupling an app to a particular vendor doesn't seem appealing at all, especially since it seems that the functionalities they offer are more or less the same. (I'm thinking about the OpenAI's Agent API and Anthropic's Agent SDK as "alternatives.)
Pi durable for me
Also see the existing Cursor Typescript SDK.
https://cursor.com/blog/typescript-sdk
The video is still showing @grok/agent-sdk.
Meanwhile, we know Grok Bot was really Cursor beforehand... it must be wild in there.
...why? params: [ { id: "effort", value: "high" }, { id: "fast", value: "true" }, ],
Why would anyone use this over the Anthropic sdk
You mean except for all the obvious reasons?
Honest question, why shouldn't any agent SDK's API simply be a PROMPT.md with a runtime that runs the LLM with tools; why do you need excessive abstractions over that like langchain offers?
Is it to have boundaries of some determinism?
My 2c is that agents are not at the level where companies can easily just have unconstrained LLM with tools and let it be. Different parts of the workflow can have different models, different tools, different constraints, guardrails, etc.
The entrypoint still has to come from somewhere, and it's much more convenient to be able to explain the security and legal teams how data is handled, what is logged, how you can have control over a scenario where the agent does something unexpected.
Sure, for a personal project that could be enough, but we all know those companies target enterprise customers, and you would be surprised how little adoption there is when it comes to workflow automation due to the lack of controls.
What do you use for that?
>runtime that runs the LLM with tools
This "runtime" is what you are building with LangChain.. A harness like claude code/codex etc is general purpose and its env is a shell + tools. But with a custom runtime (basically a loop where we ask llm what to do next), we can give it specific tools which we define in code. This can help with things like authorization since, well its custom code you own.. so the runtime gets the tools scoped to the users permissions etc.
What's the point in putting the vibe back in if you're implementing a specific software development process to avoid the vibe?
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