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Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness
- airbreather 6mo agothis is fucking awesome it is fast, there is no fucking gateway fuckaround or any other similar issues, up and going in seconds straight away I added two skills, that it wrote for itself, read my gmails and attachments, and browse the web, text browser first up, render page and screenshot with OCR for javascript heavy pages\ then I asked it, find the best value ram in my area, second hand as well as new, try gumtree and facebook marketplace, plus anything else relevant, bam - 15 seconds maybe a concise summarised range of options then on another project, I told it to /study and then used the gmail plugin to access all the relevant gmails and attachments (which included minutes of all the meetings) and it was fully up to date with the project I am working on and ready to go best agent I have used so far by a country mile, if you don't try it then that is your loss did I mention it was fast, like 3x to 5x better productivity fast compared to openclaw, at least one thing it does not do is support the up arrow/down arrow to scroll thru past commands, but you can just tell it, "run that websearch for ram again" etc, i will totally live witht his for all the other positives
- patriceckhart 5mo agoThanks for the feedback! Since version 0.1.44, you can use the left/right arrow keys to jump through the "History".
- Terretta 4mo agoWhat model behind all this?
- smy_smy 4mo ago[flagged]
- tipiirai 5mo agoThought Claude models can only be used through Claude Code. I was wrong, I guess.
- dsrtslnd23 5mo agoDidn't they allow using oauth in custom harnesses for personal use (e.g. pi.dev)?
- PufPufPuf 5mo agoThat changes every 2-3 days. The current stance is that only interactive mode of first party harnesses is covered under monthly plans, everything else is pay-as-you-go with monthly credit allowance equal to the plan price.
- popcorncowboy 5mo agoThough this is how it will stay, and it won't be changing back. Anthropic has understood clearly for a while that they need to capture the stack. They will subsidise Max for as long as they need to do this. All other off-stack usage will get pushed into per-token billing.
- helloplanets 5mo agoIf you use API billing, you can use them from anywhere. But using Claude Code with a Max subscription is massively cheaper for programming. You should never use Claude models for programming through API billing, unless forced. The difference will easily rack up to thousands of dollars for heavy users.
- ramon156 5mo agoACP still exists, not sure why no one other than Zed is using it. Its best of both worlds, because you're using their CLI but in another tool
- jshreder 5mo agoWith the coming changes in June, ACP will charge towards the same budget as claude -p and the Claude Code SDK (since it uses the SDK), so ACP no longer solves this. It's (I think) why Zed added "Terminal Threads" [1] to their agent workflow 1: https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads
- karakanb 5mo agoZot seems interesting, this is the first time I see it. On a quickl look it seems like Pi, but in Go. I was hoping to embed Pi into some of our internal projects and the typescript stuff was blocking me, I'll definitely give Zot a look.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- patriceckhart 5mo agopi is awesome, quite possibly the best OSS tool out there. You should definitely give it a shot if it fits your stack. zot has become my daily driver. I didnt build zot to compete. I built it to really get a feel for how harnesses work, and I do it with Go simply because I love the language. More on that here: https://www.patriceckhart.com/blog/posts/2026-04-23/why-i-built-zot https://www.patriceckhart.com/blog/posts/2026-04-23/why-i-bu...
- hydra-f 5mo agoWhat makes pi so awesome? It feels as though the whole thing is held together with tape. Poor performance, poor UX. Security is an afterthought. Not that versatile (as of yet). You certainly are better off writing your own personal harness.
- patriceckhart 5mo agopi is extensible at every turn. thats what makes it special. zot is more limited there.
- hydra-f 5mo agoExtensibility has a cost which affects all my earlier points. Pi is fine for testing things you might include in your harness, but that's where I would draw the line
- 5mo ago
- lifty 5mo agoAnyone here using Zot and can share their experience?
- gartheuncle 5mo agoI've been using zot since it was released. It works and does what it's supposed to. Patrick responds to suggestions and bugs really fast.
- LoganDark 5mo agoI'm getting a little fatigued by all the harnesses that are made by other coding agents. Like, when I checked out opencode, it looked and felt incredibly impressive, until I looked at how frequently it completely invalidated the KV-cache. After looking at the source code, it's basically unsalvageable and I ran far far away. (It's mostly imperative garbage which is typical of undisciplined agent output. It doesn't even use React, it uses some other reactive library in a non-declarative way, I think SolidJS) DeepSeek Reasonix is better in terms of cache stability because that is a core tenet, which should honestly be table stakes for agentic tooling, but the TUI is kind of ugly and the tools also kind of suck (they pretend the sandboxed working directory is at /, which makes the model almost unable to use MCP servers that expect to be passed filesystem paths). On top of that, it doesn't expose the structuredContent of MCP server tool responses, which is like... the entire point of it? Now all my tools that return huge swaths of JSON data into structuredContent, which Claude Code can process perfectly fine, need an additional separate path to generate readable versions of it into content because Reasonix ignores structuredContent for some reason. That's supposed to be the model-side output, while content is the user-side output, but whatever. I don't know how much more of this I can take. I'm in the process of working on my own harness essentially from scratch, manually, because I'm so fed up with all this vibecoded tooling that misses incredibly basic and obvious design. I feel like Claude Code used to be from scratch like this and that was why it was so good, until they started vibecoding large swaths of it and stripping away all the power-user features and good taste that made it so wonderful before. Now it even has random, inexplicable problems like "API Error: 400 messages.1.content.15: `thinking` or `redacted_thinking` blocks in the latest assistant message cannot be modified. These blocks must remain as they were in the original response." which shouldn't even be able to happen!! And like, I get the distillation angle of why thinking output was completely removed from Claude, but I work in bypass-permissions mode and I want to correct misunderstandings as I see them. This is different than wanting to review each edit. Speaking of reviewing each edit, I hate that Reasonix doesn't print diffs, and just says "use git diff". Like, no? I want to see each change the agent made and when. I don't want to only see one diff at the end; that nearly ruins the point of conversation history.
- lejalv 5mo agoThanks for sharing your experience with reasonix in detail. Have you tried pi? I don't think I am at your level, so I'd welcome some more advanced user's advice.
- cedws 5mo agoGlad to see tooling in my native language. I don’t want to touch TypeScript stuff with a ten foot pole, but sadly it seems to be the lingua franca for agentic tools. The one thing that would keep me from making the jump is CC’s auto mode.
- Mashimo 5mo ago> I don’t want to touch TypeScript stuff with a ten foot pole Why not? Is it because you need to change the code?
- cedws 5mo agoNo, I’m just extremely averse to anything to do with JS/TS. The amount of bloat is insane and there’s a new supply chain attack every day at this point. Definition of a tire fire.
- Terretta 4mo ago> Is it because you need to change the code? Indeed! It would be difficult to deliberately design a more long-term-TCO-destructive ecosystem. Effectively everything about it is "the one you throw away", and worse, effectively everyone uses it as if they're building the one to throw away.
- exe34 5mo agoWhat's wrong with typescript? I was thinking of getting into it.
- JaggerJo 5mo ago[flagged]
- patriceckhart 5mo agozot is a coding agent harness. not a data vault, not a pacemaker, and not a life-support device in any medical sense. Ive been coding for almost 20 years, and for the past few with Go. Nobody would believe that a project of this scale or even a much smaller one could be pulled off, halfway stable, over a couple of days. Not even with a blueprint or two in hand. Thats why it matters, and its totally fair, to point out when something is largely vibe-coded. "Vibe slopped" is meant more as a joke. The essential parts of the code I actually understand. Some of them I modified and overhauled myself. zot is a learning project not production logic with peoples sensible data or lives depending on it. ;-)
- sshine 5mo agoI get the joke, and I appreciate it. As someone with 20 years of professional coding experience who vibe-codes certain tools in my current stack, I really get it. But I'd still remove it from the front page, it just reads like you admit it sucks. Which vibe-coding a dev tool doesn't have to. Judging from the animation, you actually cared to test the TUI quite a lot. (I've been vibe-coding TUI components without making an actual harness.)
- patriceckhart 5mo agoThanks for the tip. I might do that—though honestly, Im a sucker for jokes like this. And yeah, the TUI is literally 98% vibe coded.
- arecsu 5mo agoIf it helps, I did totally get the joke and love when there are these bits of humanity and sarcasm, somehow lost in today's landscape, it used to be more frequent in the past. And I also get what you've described in the previous paragraph from just reading it. Might be that some people get it, some don't. Do what you feel best!
- dang 5mo agoSince this project hasn't had much attention, I replaced the submitted title ("Zot now supports Claude Opus 4.8") with that of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931161. I hope that's ok! (I also merged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941645 from that thread into this one)
- sally_glance 5mo agoDoes that also merge view/vote metrics? I mean I could probably look it up in the source, but I'm lazy...
- dang 5mo agoNo.
- ignatif 5mo agothank you for the honest description
- Terretta 4mo agoThis real world usage of LLM's favorite word shows why LLMs pair this word with "what I'm about to say is seriously unreliable". Here, "honest description" means the author didn't make something out to be more than it is. Perfect. Ironically, LLMs don't apply that to the thing they're describing, but to their description itself. Meaning: when they say "honestly" it flags they have no idea and are about to be lazy, make it up, and confidently assert nonsense. It's easiest to understand if you mentally insert a phrase: "Honestly [you should disregard this because I am just making this up but], you made a great choice."
- roxolotl 5mo agoCoding agent harnesses strike me as similar to blog generators. They can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. Plugins help with adoption. And if you want it’s real easy to write your own that does exactly what you want.
- varun_ch 5mo agoIsn’t practically all simple software like this?
- triyambakam 5mo agoIn a reductionist view yeah but blog generators and agent harnesses sit at a different spectrum than an EHR/Excel/whatever other insanely complex edge case ridden work you can think of
- jadbox 5mo agoIs there a good benchmark leaderboard between coding agents?
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agohttps://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?coding-agents-performance-chart=index https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?coding-ag... This seems to be a benchmark but sadly between just primarily claude-code, codex,cursor and (gemini-cli?)
- impulser_ 5mo agoHarnesses aren't really going to change much of the performance on models like Opus, and GPT. You literally can just give the model a bash tool and it will do just fine in fact it will most likely do better than majority of harnesses due to how well models are at bash. The model do all the lifting. It really doesn't matter which harness you use.
- grodes 5mo agoFocus on cache hits
- proxysna 5mo agoThere is a docker registry under the same name. https://zotregistry.dev https://zotregistry.dev
- cabaalis 5mo agoNice to see one that isn't trying to grow into an agent business or cloud service.
- unshavedyak 5mo ago> Subscription-capable - Anthropic Claude Pro/Max (anthropic), OpenAI Codex / ChatGPT Plus/Pro (openai-codex), Kimi Code (kimi), and GitHub Copilot (github-copilot). Am i reading this right? Seems to suggest that this can be used with Claude Code Subscription, which isn't true i think. Did this pre-date the CC Subscription change? Or is it playing fast and loose with the rules hah. Maybe it's using `-p`, which technically works for another few days i think lol. (That's going away.. what, June 1st? Something like that?)
- dh1011 5mo agoI have the same concern. Looks like they do include a disclaimer in the GitHub README, but not on zot.sh.
- sally_glance 5mo agoIt does not use -p, but it does try to impersonate Claude when talking to the Anthropic API. Will they detect the difference in usage patterns and ban anyone who exploits them? Who knows.
- dsatrainer 4mo agoRiskkyy riskyyyy
- egonschiele 5mo agoI'm all for people writing their own coding agent harnesses... is there anything different about this one? Its not clear why I'd choose this over pi, opencode, or other existing options
- edg5000 5mo ago"vibe-slopped" - word of the year 2026?
- dsatrainer 4mo agovibe-zotting will be 2027
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoGreat minds think alike? Two months ago I created an agent called 'zop' [1] that's also a static Go app. It's not a code harness, it's a cli tool for quick one-liners (faster and less memory than opencode --prompt) with canned system messages. With compile tags you can strip it down to just prompt execution and the binary's less than 3MB. ....But also because feature creep, you can compile-in text-to-speech, speech-to-text, an interactive mode, an Android app, MCP/tool calling, multiple provider support, and now a really crappy web interface that only half works. It turns out vibe coding is harder/more time-consuming than it seems... Creating an alternative to beads made it more manageable, but I need multi-agent orchestration to code it so I don't have to babysit it and manually QA it (because just installing playwright and telling the AI to write tests doesn't really work). Kind of a waste of time, but interesting learning experience. Now I know why there aren't a hundred magically awesome user tools out there... they're still not that easy to make. [1] https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/zop https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/zop
- throwa356262 5mo agoThis looks really interesting! Being a single binary with modest memory requirements, I wonder if it can be used as a voice assistant in somethings like a rpi.
- dsatrainer 4mo agoI was thinking the same thing!
- throwa356262 5mo ago[dead]
- sanreds 4mo agoYet another but useful. Are you also planning to introduce any GUI over it like a studio/IDE or something?
- patriceckhart 4mo agoI'm working on a GUI. If you are interested, contact me on X or by email. You can find my email address on patriceckhart.com
- sanreds 4mo ago[flagged]