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HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?

233 points · 99 comments · matt_d

  1. jswelker · · focus · HN ↗
    Much of the extra weight of Claude Code and Codex harness are (ostensibly?) for security and alignment purposes. Whether they are effective is an open question, but leaving those dimensions out and calling it a tax is disingenuous, just turning insecurity into a negative externality.

    "Why pay the waste disposal tax? Dumping into the ocean is free!"

    Pi actively omits any sort of guardrails and sandboxing in the name of speed and simplicity, so it is not shocking that it is faster and simpler.

    Doubling the cost of something in the name of vague security is standard operating procedure for big enterprises, maybe even quite cheap.

    1. roywiggins · · focus · HN ↗
      It's not hard to sandbox Pi without adding anything substantial to the actual size of the system prompt, which is what HarnessTax is mostly measuring. Wrapping it in nono.sh costs approximately zero tokens.

      (I do think Pi should ship with more than zero builtin sandboxing though)

      1. zackify · · focus · HN ↗
        I have a couple hundred line TUI that just clones an LXD container and I get all my repos and infra isolated in 5s with pi having isolation to that container. Swap between any instance. Port forward to host all automatic.

        Funny to me how stuff is described these days. Seems like some people lack the full understanding of all these different systems and really overcomplicate their harness setups or use super bloated all in one tooling.

        1. skirmish · · focus · HN ↗
          I tried putting my agent in an LXC / Incus container but then I also needed it to process videos stored on a NAS, and that was not easy at all. I tried a FUSE-based NFS client [1] but it was very flaky and would randomly report files having zero length and fail processing.

          [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookarchive&#x2F;nfusr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookarchive&#x2F;nfusr

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