HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?
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HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
nojs · · focus · HN ↗
I also wish the discussion around Pi did not always use cost/token count as the metric. It's amazingly token efficient, but how does it stack up again opencode and others if you don't care about token count?
My experience is that the harness is mainly polish preventing failed tool calls, bad edits, stuff like that, but doesn't make much difference to the overall "intelligence". But that opencode seems slightly more robust against stupid errors than out of the box Pi due to the additional context it forces through every thread.
calgoo · · focus · HN ↗
The harness becomes more and more important, the smaller the model is as you need to offload context management as well as memory to the harness. The big models basically just need a bash prompt tooling and you let the model manage everything inside its own context.
mobelkh · · focus · HN ↗
tacomagick · · focus · HN ↗
verdverm · · focus · HN ↗
disclaimer, I use opencode and have customized parts of it, and will do more, but it is a solid foundation and comes with more out of the box than pi
pi is too minimal for me, I'd go back to my custom built harness if I wanted to be back at that level
esperent · · focus · HN ↗
Such as?
verdverm · · focus · HN ↗
They also have instructions about how to format certain output, which conflicts with the instructions we have in repo. I only discovered yesterday because we were wondering why the agent kept picking certain tools.
esperent · · focus · HN ↗
verdverm · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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