4 ms·

Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” Right now, it’s like an AC vs DC between Claude and ChatGPT, but once

Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” Right now, it’s like an AC vs DC between Claude and ChatGPT, but once that settles, the harnesses will be the actual value providers. And Pi is the best harness because of the amazing extension system. You can build extensions that turn Pi into a stock trader, software factory, anything. I tried switching to another harness but none have extension functionality as good as Pi. Even if there is a new harness or agent project, I tell Pi to dig into the codebase and then make me an extension that brings that functionality into Pi. I did it with Prime Intellect’s and Deepseek’s harnesses and those are built on Pi.

oceansky 1mo ago
I want to move from Claude Desktop to Pi, but I found it a little unfriendly. Any tips to set it up?
- zukzuk 1mo ago
  I haven’t tried it myself yet but I’m under the impression that Hermes Agent might be what you’re looking for?
- theturtletalks 1mo ago
  Pi doesn’t have a UI like Claude Desktop. It also doesn’t work with the Claude subscription, only API key and pricing. So if you do want to use it, use the Codex sub. Once you install it, run Pi and /login and you’ll get login with ChatGPT. From there, Pi can tweak it’s settings if you ask. Check out their extensions (or ask Pi) and that will take you most of the way there. What hiccups were you having?
  - goosejuice 1mo ago
    > It also doesn’t work with the Claude subscription, only API key and pricing. Not out of the box, but you can add agent sdk. I'm not sure how great the results will be though.
- ni10c 1mo ago
  Can you be more specific regarding unfriendliness?
cyanydeez 1mo ago
what have you built other than a harness?
- theturtletalks 1mo ago
  I built a software factory and am now building a stock trader using opencandle extension[0] and a custom extension. For inspiration for how to tweak Pi, check out OMP, Prime Intellect, and Deepseek harnesses. 0. https://github.com/Kahtaf/OpenCandle https://github.com/Kahtaf/OpenCandle
  - dominotw 1mo ago
    > Prime Intellect looking at the website. i can't really tell if they have benchmarks and measuremnts on how all that improves capablities over just using regular agent withtout all that
  - cyanydeez 1mo ago
    arn't those just different types of user-used harnesses?
irishcoffee 1mo ago
How does Pi compare to vscode? Admittedly that is the only “agent/harness” I’ve ever used.
GodelNumbering 1mo ago
This is a plug, but relevant. I recently added a 'build native tools on the fly' functionality to Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac) that works like: 1. You can use the '/new-tool' and tell what kind of tool you want (including whether it should be task-scoped, workspace-scoped, or global), the model builds it, the harness runs validation and other tests until the tool is ready 2. The model decides that in such and such task, it would be helpful to have a tool like this, it can build a task-scoped tool. In either scenario, the tool catalog is rebuilt, and the new tool is instantly available in the next turn.
- _superposition_ 1mo ago
  This type of modification of the harness on the fly to fit the need is the future. The only thing left after that is the mobile front. I think static app store type software as we know it is a thing of the past. You'll only ever need one self modifying app.
timbowhite 1mo ago
Pi's most popular extensions, by download count: https://pi.dev/packages?type=extension https://pi.dev/packages?type=extension
- Aeolun 1mo ago
  Kinda ironic that the most popular extensions turn pi back into claude.
dominotw 1mo ago
i think its the opposite. claude code apparently removed hundreds of lines of system prompt because its not relavent anymore with newer models. also i think its hard to build general harnesses if they were trained on specific harness architecture.
- theturtletalks 1mo ago
  Yes but Pi has had a minimal system prompt since inception. Skills and Pi extensions let you make a hyper specific harness for specific use cases. For general conversation, harnesses are overkill most times. There’s evidence of harnesses making a smaller, weaker model perform better than SOTA and some benchmarks ban harnesses because it becomes too easy.
  - tokai 1mo ago
    All agentic editors/frameworks have skills and extensions and plugins?
mpawelski 1mo ago
> Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” I really though this comment was a satire ...
- grey-area 1mo ago
  Sadly, many people have bought into the cult that LLMs will lead to AGI. I guess if that is your worldview then all this babbling about new frontiers makes more sense. They probably used an LLM to come up with this bizarre metaphor.
  - theturtletalks 1mo ago
    Did I even mention AGI? All I’m saying is that we’re hitting a plateau with how good models are while harnesses are untapped potential. And with Pi, you can swap models like electricity companies. Yes for now, the electricity is better with some companies but this will stabilize. And no I came up with the metaphor all on my own, send me the chat of you getting the LLM to come up with it. Why not argue based on merit instead of strawman and ad hominem attacks?
    - grey-area 1mo ago
      I’m afraid it’s a terrible metaphor, starting with the fact that LLMs are nothing like electricity, and the relation of harnesses to them is nothing like that of electronics to electricity, save perhaps one is a prerequisite of the other. Harnesses (and the concept of agents before them) presuppose competence in LLMs which simply doesn’t exist.
      - theturtletalks 1mo ago
        I didn’t come with the electricity idea, it was Sam Altman saying it will be like a utility down the line and metered[0]. What would the “electronics” be in your opinion? 0. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ai-utility-electricity-water-openai-2026-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ai-utility-electr...
sejje 1mo ago
What did you bring over from prime-agent? (I use prime-agent as my daily since it launched) I primarily like how it manages sessions, and how agents can easily reference other sessions.
- theturtletalks 1mo ago
  Something like this since Prime Intellect uses RLM under the hood: https://github.com/manojlds/pi-rlm https://github.com/manojlds/pi-rlm
jrflo 1mo ago
I've never used Pi but I don't see why you can't use stock codex or claude code for the same purpose, what makes Pi special? I've built plenty of custom harnesses on top of claude code and codex using custom skills or simple markdown instructions and subagents. Never had any issues or limitations with that approach. I do agree that harnesses are going to extend AI capabilities a lot in the next year, but after reading Pi's page I don't see anything that makes it particularly special in terms of functionality, other than being more provider-agnostic.
- throwup238 1mo ago
  For one you can ask Pi to create a TUI extension, so along with the agent interface you can add whatever custom TUI you need, such as portfolio stock tickers, alerts, whatever you want. Many of my harnesses eventually turn into customized UIs around the chat interface.
  - pests 1mo ago
    I was doing something similar months ago with openclaw. I had skills/scripts that replaced my todo list, expense tracker, habits, whatever etc and then would create a minimal web ui. Then a deploy skill that wires it up to my docker/traefik setup. This eventually led to a custom chat dashboard with those wired up as widgets.
- lebek 1mo ago
  Codex and Claude historically had more bloat in their system prompt and tools. Pi is minimal by design so more adaptable. But to be fair Claude Code is moving in the Pi direction with a small system prompt.
- ni10c 1mo ago
  Author here. I think our website could be much clearer - but Pi is fundamentally easier to mold than other harnesses. It’s not magic but it strikes the balance well of letting you shape it extensively without letting you break it.
  - 1mo ago
Topfi 1mo ago
Please tell me this is satire, it reads like straight from the depths of LinkedIn where a while loop is seen as the second coming…
hliyan 1mo ago
Are human HN commenters now starting to speak in a dialect of Claudish?
amelius 1mo ago
> If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” (...) the harnesses will be the actual value providers. Don't get ahead of yourself. Harnesses are not exactly rocket science and will be a commodity. The real value providers here are the hardware, then the LLM as a distant second, and at a much larger distance the harness.
- romanhounds 1mo ago
  [dead]
- conmod278 1mo ago
  https://www.latent.space/p/attention-interface https://www.latent.space/p/attention-interface Labs are now post-training models with Harness so that Harness now gets absorbed into the weights.
  - goosejuice 1mo ago
    My naive intuition is that as harnesses converge on shape and models improve the first party advantage will mostly disappear.
  - layer8 1mo ago
    I’d say that harnesses almost by definition are the parts that you want to keep customizable. That won’t get absorbed into the weights.
    - datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
      Depends on your product strategy. If you only care about how your model will be used in the context of a harness (perhaps, specifically the harness that you designed), then the incentive is plainly there to optimize the weights within the context of the harness.
  - wyre 1mo ago
    What is being absorbed into weights is tool usage. It is incredibly counterproductive to train models on a specific harness, when instead it can be trained to reason about the tools that it has available to itself and how to best use those tools to accomplish it's goal. Would you rather hire an engineer that can adopt to your org's prefered tooling, or hire an engineer that can only perform well with their own favorite tools? It's the same thing.
lebek 1mo ago
The harness is just another codebase for the model to write and optimize. The value is still very much in the model.
jacobgold 1mo ago
> ...once that settles, the harnesses will be the actual value providers. The words "once that settles" are doing historic levels of work here. No human on earth has a clear idea whether model technology will settle tomorrow or 100 years from now. There's every reason to expect architectural breakthroughs will keep being discovered and causing nuclear blasts of forward progress.
grim_io 1mo ago
I don't think so. What I can see is a world where we end up with a Chromium-shaped harness, a fully featured standard implementation everyone builds against, because doing every single thing yourself would be crazy. The antithesis to Pi, if you will.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- jbstack 1mo ago
  I disagree with this. Unlike training models (which requires huge compute), harness development is available to anyone with an editor and ideas. That means that solo devs and small startups can still make meaningful progress. Also, having only a "standard implementation" makes no sense for a harness. A standard implementation would need to try to be as good as possible at all things. But you'd often want a specialised harness designed for exactly your use case.
  - grim_io 1mo ago
    I don't see us tinkering with Pi in 5 years. Some standard solution will emerge, which will be amplified by models being trained specifically to work with it.
- wyre 1mo ago
  It is way too early to tell. If we are comparing to web browsers we are in the early 90s with Netscape, IE, Firefox, etc. I don't even think we are at the point where agent's have a metaphorical JavaScript, we are that early. The thing that makes everyone build against Chromium is because web browsers are very hard and it is well supported by dev tools like Electron and Playwright. Harnesses are so easy compared to a web browser, I'm curious what in this world you see that would make building your own harness seem crazy, because I don't see it.
Aardwolf 1mo ago
If LLMs are oxen, harnesses are... the harnesses
- qarl2 1mo ago
  Yeah. This is pretty clearly the origin of the usage. The harness facilitates the work animal doing work for you. Not climbing harnesses to keep you safe.
epolanski 1mo ago
Both Claude and codex are unappealing, crap, generic agents that you have 0 control over. Don't understand what people see in them.
faangguyindia 1mo ago
No, DSH is not built on top of pi
dbrecht_ 1mo ago
I've been getting a little frustrated with having to rearchitect things any time I want to try a new harness. Wrote about my most recent experiments with separating conversation from control loop here and using MCP as the seam here: https://demianbrecht.com/posts/the-harness-within-the-harness/ https://demianbrecht.com/posts/the-harness-within-the-harnes.... This allows me to build a spectrum of agentic to entirely deterministic tools and be able to port them from one harness to another with only a minimal amount of harness-specific config.

oceansky 1mo ago

I want to move from Claude Desktop to Pi, but I found it a little unfriendly. Any tips to set it up?

zukzuk 1mo ago
I haven’t tried it myself yet but I’m under the impression that Hermes Agent might be what you’re looking for?
theturtletalks 1mo ago
Pi doesn’t have a UI like Claude Desktop. It also doesn’t work with the Claude subscription, only API key and pricing. So if you do want to use it, use the Codex sub. Once you install it, run Pi and /login and you’ll get login with ChatGPT. From there, Pi can tweak it’s settings if you ask. Check out their extensions (or ask Pi) and that will take you most of the way there. What hiccups were you having?
- goosejuice 1mo ago
  > It also doesn’t work with the Claude subscription, only API key and pricing. Not out of the box, but you can add agent sdk. I'm not sure how great the results will be though.
ni10c 1mo ago
Can you be more specific regarding unfriendliness?

cyanydeez 1mo ago

what have you built other than a harness?

theturtletalks 1mo ago
I built a software factory and am now building a stock trader using opencandle extension[0] and a custom extension. For inspiration for how to tweak Pi, check out OMP, Prime Intellect, and Deepseek harnesses. 0. https://github.com/Kahtaf/OpenCandle https://github.com/Kahtaf/OpenCandle
- dominotw 1mo ago
  > Prime Intellect looking at the website. i can't really tell if they have benchmarks and measuremnts on how all that improves capablities over just using regular agent withtout all that
- cyanydeez 1mo ago
  arn't those just different types of user-used harnesses?

irishcoffee 1mo ago

How does Pi compare to vscode? Admittedly that is the only “agent/harness” I’ve ever used.

GodelNumbering 1mo ago

This is a plug, but relevant. I recently added a 'build native tools on the fly' functionality to Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac) that works like: 1. You can use the '/new-tool' and tell what kind of tool you want (including whether it should be task-scoped, workspace-scoped, or global), the model builds it, the harness runs validation and other tests until the tool is ready 2. The model decides that in such and such task, it would be helpful to have a tool like this, it can build a task-scoped tool. In either scenario, the tool catalog is rebuilt, and the new tool is instantly available in the next turn.

_superposition_ 1mo ago
This type of modification of the harness on the fly to fit the need is the future. The only thing left after that is the mobile front. I think static app store type software as we know it is a thing of the past. You'll only ever need one self modifying app.

timbowhite 1mo ago

Pi's most popular extensions, by download count: https://pi.dev/packages?type=extension https://pi.dev/packages?type=extension

Aeolun 1mo ago
Kinda ironic that the most popular extensions turn pi back into claude.

dominotw 1mo ago

i think its the opposite. claude code apparently removed hundreds of lines of system prompt because its not relavent anymore with newer models. also i think its hard to build general harnesses if they were trained on specific harness architecture.

theturtletalks 1mo ago
Yes but Pi has had a minimal system prompt since inception. Skills and Pi extensions let you make a hyper specific harness for specific use cases. For general conversation, harnesses are overkill most times. There’s evidence of harnesses making a smaller, weaker model perform better than SOTA and some benchmarks ban harnesses because it becomes too easy.
- tokai 1mo ago
  All agentic editors/frameworks have skills and extensions and plugins?

mpawelski 1mo ago

> Harnesses are the next frontier. If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” I really though this comment was a satire ...

grey-area 1mo ago
Sadly, many people have bought into the cult that LLMs will lead to AGI. I guess if that is your worldview then all this babbling about new frontiers makes more sense. They probably used an LLM to come up with this bizarre metaphor.
- theturtletalks 1mo ago
  Did I even mention AGI? All I’m saying is that we’re hitting a plateau with how good models are while harnesses are untapped potential. And with Pi, you can swap models like electricity companies. Yes for now, the electricity is better with some companies but this will stabilize. And no I came up with the metaphor all on my own, send me the chat of you getting the LLM to come up with it. Why not argue based on merit instead of strawman and ad hominem attacks?
  - grey-area 1mo ago
    I’m afraid it’s a terrible metaphor, starting with the fact that LLMs are nothing like electricity, and the relation of harnesses to them is nothing like that of electronics to electricity, save perhaps one is a prerequisite of the other. Harnesses (and the concept of agents before them) presuppose competence in LLMs which simply doesn’t exist.
    - theturtletalks 1mo ago
      I didn’t come with the electricity idea, it was Sam Altman saying it will be like a utility down the line and metered[0]. What would the “electronics” be in your opinion? 0. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ai-utility-electricity-water-openai-2026-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ai-utility-electr...

sejje 1mo ago

What did you bring over from prime-agent? (I use prime-agent as my daily since it launched) I primarily like how it manages sessions, and how agents can easily reference other sessions.

theturtletalks 1mo ago
Something like this since Prime Intellect uses RLM under the hood: https://github.com/manojlds/pi-rlm https://github.com/manojlds/pi-rlm

jrflo 1mo ago

I've never used Pi but I don't see why you can't use stock codex or claude code for the same purpose, what makes Pi special? I've built plenty of custom harnesses on top of claude code and codex using custom skills or simple markdown instructions and subagents. Never had any issues or limitations with that approach. I do agree that harnesses are going to extend AI capabilities a lot in the next year, but after reading Pi's page I don't see anything that makes it particularly special in terms of functionality, other than being more provider-agnostic.

throwup238 1mo ago
For one you can ask Pi to create a TUI extension, so along with the agent interface you can add whatever custom TUI you need, such as portfolio stock tickers, alerts, whatever you want. Many of my harnesses eventually turn into customized UIs around the chat interface.
- pests 1mo ago
  I was doing something similar months ago with openclaw. I had skills/scripts that replaced my todo list, expense tracker, habits, whatever etc and then would create a minimal web ui. Then a deploy skill that wires it up to my docker/traefik setup. This eventually led to a custom chat dashboard with those wired up as widgets.
lebek 1mo ago
Codex and Claude historically had more bloat in their system prompt and tools. Pi is minimal by design so more adaptable. But to be fair Claude Code is moving in the Pi direction with a small system prompt.
ni10c 1mo ago
Author here. I think our website could be much clearer - but Pi is fundamentally easier to mold than other harnesses. It’s not magic but it strikes the balance well of letting you shape it extensively without letting you break it.
- 1mo ago

Topfi 1mo ago

Please tell me this is satire, it reads like straight from the depths of LinkedIn where a while loop is seen as the second coming…

hliyan 1mo ago

Are human HN commenters now starting to speak in a dialect of Claudish?

amelius 1mo ago

> If LLMs are electricity, harnesses are the “electronics.” (...) the harnesses will be the actual value providers. Don't get ahead of yourself. Harnesses are not exactly rocket science and will be a commodity. The real value providers here are the hardware, then the LLM as a distant second, and at a much larger distance the harness.

romanhounds 1mo ago
[dead]
conmod278 1mo ago
https://www.latent.space/p/attention-interface https://www.latent.space/p/attention-interface Labs are now post-training models with Harness so that Harness now gets absorbed into the weights.
- goosejuice 1mo ago
  My naive intuition is that as harnesses converge on shape and models improve the first party advantage will mostly disappear.
- layer8 1mo ago
  I’d say that harnesses almost by definition are the parts that you want to keep customizable. That won’t get absorbed into the weights.
  - datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
    Depends on your product strategy. If you only care about how your model will be used in the context of a harness (perhaps, specifically the harness that you designed), then the incentive is plainly there to optimize the weights within the context of the harness.
- wyre 1mo ago
  What is being absorbed into weights is tool usage. It is incredibly counterproductive to train models on a specific harness, when instead it can be trained to reason about the tools that it has available to itself and how to best use those tools to accomplish it's goal. Would you rather hire an engineer that can adopt to your org's prefered tooling, or hire an engineer that can only perform well with their own favorite tools? It's the same thing.

lebek 1mo ago

The harness is just another codebase for the model to write and optimize. The value is still very much in the model.

jacobgold 1mo ago

> ...once that settles, the harnesses will be the actual value providers. The words "once that settles" are doing historic levels of work here. No human on earth has a clear idea whether model technology will settle tomorrow or 100 years from now. There's every reason to expect architectural breakthroughs will keep being discovered and causing nuclear blasts of forward progress.

grim_io 1mo ago

I don't think so. What I can see is a world where we end up with a Chromium-shaped harness, a fully featured standard implementation everyone builds against, because doing every single thing yourself would be crazy. The antithesis to Pi, if you will.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
jbstack 1mo ago
I disagree with this. Unlike training models (which requires huge compute), harness development is available to anyone with an editor and ideas. That means that solo devs and small startups can still make meaningful progress. Also, having only a "standard implementation" makes no sense for a harness. A standard implementation would need to try to be as good as possible at all things. But you'd often want a specialised harness designed for exactly your use case.
- grim_io 1mo ago
  I don't see us tinkering with Pi in 5 years. Some standard solution will emerge, which will be amplified by models being trained specifically to work with it.
wyre 1mo ago
It is way too early to tell. If we are comparing to web browsers we are in the early 90s with Netscape, IE, Firefox, etc. I don't even think we are at the point where agent's have a metaphorical JavaScript, we are that early. The thing that makes everyone build against Chromium is because web browsers are very hard and it is well supported by dev tools like Electron and Playwright. Harnesses are so easy compared to a web browser, I'm curious what in this world you see that would make building your own harness seem crazy, because I don't see it.

Aardwolf 1mo ago

If LLMs are oxen, harnesses are... the harnesses

qarl2 1mo ago
Yeah. This is pretty clearly the origin of the usage. The harness facilitates the work animal doing work for you. Not climbing harnesses to keep you safe.

epolanski 1mo ago

Both Claude and codex are unappealing, crap, generic agents that you have 0 control over. Don't understand what people see in them.

faangguyindia 1mo ago

No, DSH is not built on top of pi

dbrecht_ 1mo ago

I've been getting a little frustrated with having to rearchitect things any time I want to try a new harness. Wrote about my most recent experiments with separating conversation from control loop here and using MCP as the seam here: https://demianbrecht.com/posts/the-harness-within-the-harness/ https://demianbrecht.com/posts/the-harness-within-the-harnes.... This allows me to build a spectrum of agentic to entirely deterministic tools and be able to port them from one harness to another with only a minimal amount of harness-specific config.