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Nine coding harnesses vs. your laptop
- swiftcoder 22d agoI'd be interested to see how Reasonix stacks up here - they seem to have spent a lot of effort on tuning prefix cache reuse
- nasutton12 22d agosounds fun, i'll try and add it.
- montyanne 22d agoNeat article. “Chad” initially looked interesting but the minute I saw the ai-written markdown and giant commit I just left. I just can’t bring myself to read someone elses’ slop, regardless of performance. If all a developer hand writes is a truthy and readable markdown document, I really don’t care if the rest of the project is vibe coded, but I struggle to get interested in AI generated summaries and docs.
- montyanne 22d ago[dead]
- CGamesPlay 22d agoI for one am excited to learn more about how it spreads up to 50% between nights, and how nothing between the lean arms is a finding.
- ramon156 22d agoDon't forget it's, measured.
- imtringued 22d agoNot to mention it's yet another bash does everything harness which compares itself against claude code when the closest competitor is pi.dev?
- wip0 22d ago[dead]
- teekert 22d agoFun reference I tested on 32 GB ram laptop with no extra GPU: llama.cpp: “what is ls”, almost immediate starts answering at one ~word/sec. Ask opencode with same model (some gwen e4b or something) to check what’s in its working directory: 20 min to response.
- throwa356262 22d agoOpencode system prompt contains a lot of stuff but even worse is oh-my-pi where their long prompt looks like random garbage hallucinated by a 2023 LLM: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c_fQoDkULl0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c_fQoDkULl0 (see around 8:00)
- alex_john_m 22d agoWhat is this supposed to mean? "it spreads up to 50% between nights, so nothing between the lean arms is a finding."
- entrope 22d agoThe same thing as the last word of "That is the difference between 22 and 226 seconds, measured." Techies I know would mostly omit "measured"; the rest would show, not tell.
- arjie 22d agoPangram fires as usual. Human opening, 75% machine.
- stavros 22d agoMeans Claude can't write for shit.
- ramon156 22d agoOr chad
- nxobject 22d agoWhatever it is, it’s just as hilarious as Engrish…
- OleksandrC 22d agoIf you're looking for a coding agent that would fit nicely into resource-constrained environments (such as laptops, or tiny VPS servers, or tiny single-board computers, etc), and would also work great with local models - you might also like hax (https://usehax.dev/ https://usehax.dev/). 0.7 MB dynamically linked native C binary, few MBs of RAM usage when running, auto-discovers config from running local llama-server, and uses minimalist system prompt and tools for lean context usage.
- mischief6 22d agoive looked at your project before but forgot about it. I think mine is in a similar vein: https://github.com/mischief/clm https://github.com/mischief/clm it grew out of annoyance of dependencies on js runtimes, probably similar to you. mine additionally works on solaris and esp32. could be interesting to collaborate!
- d3Xt3r 22d agoI'm using fourlexboehm's minimal agent[1], it's only 674 lines of C (with comments), which results in a tiny ~10KB binary (after various optimizations). Dynamically linked, with only libcurl and libc as direct dependencies. Could probably shave a couple of KBs further if I UPX'd it. If anyone's aware of a smaller agent than this, hit me up! [1] https://gist.github.com/fourlexboehm/a60e4ef9306744483731cd176bd02e9f https://gist.github.com/fourlexboehm/a60e4ef9306744483731cd1...
- nasutton12 22d agoThe annoyance is real. Let's do it.
- Systemerror7A69 22d agoIt's absolutely amazing to see this harness. I've been on the lookout for something like this for a while now. I've used both Pi and Maki in the past but was unhappy with certain aspects for both. Pi is not respecting XDG and the author refuses to change and maki you curl an install script into bash. So the points about it being a well behaved unix tool, installing it via brew and it not being react are points I - love - to see. Thank you for making it, I will definitely try it out.
- tontinton 22d agoI've made https://maki.sh https://maki.sh for use cases such as this
- nopurpose 22d agoDo I understand correctly that in your harness models don't call tools and pass output of one to another via context, but instead code whole pipeline as small on-demand tools and see only final output?
- tontinton 22d agoThey can do both, the model decides when to use code_execution like any other tool
- frafra 22d agoIsn't using it with GitHub Copilot a violation of GitHub terms of usage, due to usage of internal API? I read that they have an official partnership with OpenCode, and I guess it is fine to use it with OpenAI Codex, but what about other coding agents like maki?
- tontinton 22d agoIs it really? I'll need to check it out
- NooneAtAll3 22d agowtf is wrong with scrolling on that website?
- nasutton12 22d agosorry its a notion.
- toasty228 22d agoA bit off topic because I'm not using local models, but I recently benchmarked codex vs pi vs omp with my workload and found codex to be both faster and more token efficient than pi/omp. There was not a single case for which pi was faster/cheaper
- weiran 22d agoPi is a very basic harness by design. On the other hand OMP is a bloated mess of other people’s workflows. The trick with pi is to extend it yourself as you use it. It’s pretty easy to do.
- toasty228 22d agoEvery single article and banchmark say pi saves token by default, the more I add extensions the more token hungry it gets. pi used 2-3x the tokens of codex. pi with subagent pkg used 8x-10x the tokens of codex. I don't see how adding bloat to pi would make it more token efficient if the baseline is so poor to start with
- kadoban 22d agoYou'd have to look where the extra tokens are coming from. If it's using extra turns or doing extra work because a tool it ~wants is missing, then adding extra things will help. Otherwise, it won't. If it's missing guidance that would help, system prompt additions might help. 8x-10x the tokens is wild, is this for some tiny artificial benchmark? That's just too much extra for something not to be just broken.
- toasty228 22d agoIt was a real workload from my day job, a modest merge request, I asked for a review and for an implementation plan to fix the findings, nothing crazy. It's the most simple thing I could think of that wasn't an artificial benchmark, self contained, no need to look for extra documentation, web searches, etc.
- humbleferret 22d agoNice writeup! I imagine these results change as harnesses are updated, so you'd need to frequently rereview. I'd love to see a tiny, reproducible benchmark repo that anyone can drop on their own hardware and then run against all harnesses at once to compare the per turn prefix token count, time to the first token, experienced tokens/sec (and prefill), cache reuse % and a pass rate on a deterministic set of small tasks. I think it could also be useful to have some way to share results and hardware for others to compare.
- nasutton12 22d agothis is in the repo in benchmarks/matrix for most of these metrics. uv run python benchmarks/matrix/run.py setup. i'd happily take your hardware's numbers!
- julesrms 22d agoHN seems to have had a stream of agent harness benchmarks floating past. And every time I wonder where the people who create these tests are looking when they're deciding which harnesses to test? Because right now nobody seems to bother testing mine! (https://juggler.studio https://juggler.studio) I know Juggler's very new, but there's so much churn going on in this area that it's hard to know where I should be pushing it. It's hard to guess whether juggler's strengths would played well with a particular test like this, or made it look bad, all feedback about the kind of parameters people are interested in is useful to know when I'm deciding what to optimise.
- kouteiheika 22d ago> And every time I wonder where the people who create these tests are looking when they're deciding which harnesses to test? Well, everyone and their dog has a custom harness now (including myself!), and more often than not they're just... pretty much the same, just with a slightly tweaked UI and different defaults? The harness needs to either be one of the popular ones, or have some sort of a unique feature which actually differentiates how it runs, not just how it looks/controls like. For example, one of the unique features of my harness is that the filesystem is completely virtualized and all filesystem I/O is part of the session. This means that any files the agent modifies aren't actually modified on disk until the user uses `/apply`, and rewinding the session also rewinds the state of the disk, and this works for all I/O and all tools (including anything spawned by the `bash` tool), and also supports at-will forking of the session including the filesystem state. This means that the agent can run fully YOLO and won't be able to nuke your disk, and it also means that there's no need to use git worktrees and such because multiple agents can just run in the same directory at the same time without an issue. Essentially, what I'm trying to say: I'd love to see more experimentation in the harness space which doesn't just involve "a different GUI".
- julesrms 22d agoWhat I've found difficult with harness design is deciding which features are actually going to be useful, and which ones are cool-sounding ideas that get people talking, but nobody actually uses in practice. It should be easy to tell the difference, but it isn't! I've had the same "virtualised filesystem" in my TODO list for a long time, but can't decide whether it's a game-changing workflow that everyone will want, or a maintenance burden that I'd regret adding... Could go either way!
- larodi 22d agoI can see this pattern of many people using Qwen 3.8 27B for local inference both on Apple Silicon and x86. This implies the model must be very good, given all these peoples' opinion converges on it.
- Scarjit 22d agoFor it's size it's pretty good. I run it and the older Qwen 3.6 35B A3B, which is significantly faster, but also a bit dumber, on both my PC and my MacBook. Wouldn't trust it for long form coding, but for shorter stuff it's really good.
- snek_case 22d agoHow far can you get with Qwen 3.6 35B A3B? What scope of task is it able to do?
- noir_lord 22d agoI've played with a fair few local models, Qwen 3.8 27B is the only one I've currently kept around (Muse Glimmer came the closest but will vacillate wildly if pushed, Qwen doesn't seem to do that (as much), I don't use it to generate code, it's essentially a glorified linter, it's pretty good at spotting dumb stuff you miss when you proofcheck your own code, especially things like comment drift where I alter a function and it makes the comment slightly (or sometimes wildly) out of sync with behaviour. It's fine for that (and I happen to have a 24GB VRAM GPU anyway since I game on the same PC). It's neat but for me not world changing. It's also just fun to be able to poke stuff and see what it can and can't do (but I could see how it could also become a time trap in cases where it gets kinda close and you want to fix that).
- suprjami 22d agoQwen 3.6 27B and 3.8 27B are the darlings of local inference at the moment. The only other thing anyone is using is Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, only by memory-rich people. Depending on which benchmarks you believe, these models (and the Ornith 1.5 finetune of Qwen 35B-A3B) are competitive at about Opus 4.5 to 4.7 level. That matches my experience in real tasks over the last few months. Not bad for something you can run at home for a couple of thousand dollars.
- asdfsa32 22d agoWhat is with the website though? Rubbish scrolling. Junky rendering with artifacts if you scroll fast.
- embedding-shape 22d agoNotion is a "knowledge database" with awful performance and jank, that some people have decided sounded like a perfect place to host their blog for whatever reason. But these shared pages been as buggy as the first time I saw them years ago, not sure what they're doing.
- deleted 22d ago[deleted]
- nasutton12 22d agosorry, its a notion not a real site.
- gramie 22d agoYes, scrolling with the arrow keys does nothing for several presses, then jumps, then acts normally, then jumps again. Really stupid and annoying. Also, Alt-Left Arrow doesn't return me to the previous page (Hacker News) and I have to use my mouse.
- nottorp 22d agoUh I have this feature I'm doing where I used a context to 600k tokens, then told Claude to make itself a summary and started a new context with it, and it's at 500k already. Mind, this is more of an exception, at least for my work, but still, what do you do with 32k tokens? Edit: i resumed a quickie that basically added a 10 line function in one spot, and even that is 50k tokens...
- nasutton12 22d agofair longer is always helpful. on a 24gb mac i'm extremely constrained, but all these exercism tasks were plausible to pass at this context length.
- grigio 22d agojcode is the best for RAM usage and browser interactions
- lrvick 22d agoReally surprised to not see jcode in there which beats everything else in efficiency by miles with one tiny rust binary.
- bozhark 22d agoWhere is the hugging face of agents and harnesses?
- hexley19 21d agoA working agent in 674 lines of C is the best answer to 'you need a framework'. The value is in the prompt and tools, not the harness.