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

233 points · 99 comments · matt_d

  1. lukax · · focus · HN ↗
    What matters more is that you use the tools that the target model was fine-tuned on.

    E.g. for editing files with Claude models you should use Edit(file_path, old_string, new_string, replace_all) but with GPT models you should use apply_patch_call(patch) (where patch is a custom patch string with custom grammar).

    It appears newer models are better at narive harness tool calls and worse at custom tools that look similar to default tools.

    <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lucumr.pocoo.org&#x2F;2026&#x2F;7&#x2F;4&#x2F;better-models-worse-tools&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lucumr.pocoo.org&#x2F;2026&#x2F;7&#x2F;4&#x2F;better-models-worse-tools&#x2F;

    1. imtringued · · focus · HN ↗
      This is correct. People seem to get the wrong idea about why agentic coding is even a thing in 2026. The naive AI techno optimist which has basically displaced the vast majority of opinions on HN, thinks that the models got &quot;smarter&quot; [0]. No, the training distribution shifted towards training on agentic sessions which made certain forms of agentic coding &quot;in-distribution&quot;.

      We are still witnessing the same underlying problems of transformers.

      [0] Think back to all the publicity stunts like the Hugging Face. They are meant to convince you that the agents have somehow progressed past the transformer limitations when those publicity stunts are actually expressions of transformer limitations.

      1. slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
        yea, plus they have been rlhf&#x27;ed to an inch of their lives as well. hard to tell if frontier models can solve more problems because of that or not.
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