>LLMs change everything around us, how we manipulate the world, and how we get the signals back.
This is sounds a little too grandiose for me. Our physical lives at least seem quite unchanged. If you don't produce code or papers for a living you might even succeed in not thinking about LLMs at all. The "signals" we're getting have certainly multiplied and increased in amplitude, though.
Regarding Pi: If hands-off code production is the future wouldn't a harness with subagents be the obvious choice? I personally enjoy minimalism in software, if only for aesthetic reasons, but even then: Can't you spin up your own bespoke version easily?
I don't think we've seen the last of anything in 2026/27. Lots of interesting projects are yet to start. I'd bet a good amount of money that some of the next Google/Microsoft-sized businesses will come from ideas in the AI harness/tooling space that no one has even noticed yet. No one is building them today, well, not exactly anyways.
And no one will see it coming except that one person in some remote part of the world (I don't say the US because, post-LLMs, I hardly think there's anything unique to US tech anymore. The best part was the sheer technical talent in the US, but that's worth a lot less with modern models and systems).
So no, I don't think we're anywhere near the end of innovation just yet. These will be some fun times, and I don't think the current way of building stuff will last too long. We'll definitely have better tools and ways of doing stuff, or so I hope. Keyboards have honestly lasted a lot longer than I would've expected, even though we've had STT tech for decades now.
Even today, office memes aside, it's just easier to type things out instead of speaking. For most people, typing is faster or fast enough anyway. Except when I'm on my phone.
Agree it feels super early for a lot of these tools. Don't think we have even scratched the surface of what working with LLMs will look like in 10 years. Just think about how many user interfaces can be completely replaced.
> Just think about how many user interfaces can be completely replaced.
Which ones? I don't see a single interface that can be replaced reliably. Complimentary maybe, but definitely not replaced. Would be interested to hear your opinion. It seems that even coding harnesses are a poor replacement for an ide. Drastically less information and if you think code doesn't even need to be read to be understood... Well, I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on that one. I think it needs to be engaged with at least as much as it was when written. Reading is the bare minimum.
> The best part was the sheer technical talent in the US
This is just nonsense.
What set the US apart is its mass and ecosystem.
What is just a good idea in any other country gets 10k users as a side project. Whereas in the US it can more easily become a multi-million VC backed 'homogenous' product for its massive population/market.
Popular tech is rarely the best at a technical level (even when the best is developed within the US), it just has more opportunity to acquire weight and momentum to become the default choice for a problem-space.
> This is just nonsense. What set the US apart is its mass and ecosystem.
That's only in post 2010s period, aka post apps and social media.
The boom in 80s/90s/2000s all of it kicked off from the deep technical know-how that rest of the planet just didn't have.
People can feel free to disagree, but they are really lying to themselves if they think anywhere else on the planet there was the sheer amount of tech talent as US until even 2010s.
Things have changed since and US is now largely valued because of it's large market and stuff, hence the off-shoring of so much of the technical and even advanced work.
But this was not the case before. With AI pushing the cost of building stuff to near 0 I don't see why you even need the US market to scale up an idea enough to prove viability. Sure the company might have to move to US, but there is no reason for it to be built in US anymore.
Invoking the Lindy Effect to proclaim that something that’s a year old will last forever is pretty funny. What the Lindy effect actually predicts is that something that’s a year old is pretty likely to only last one more year before being replaced.
My guess is we see a cambrian explosion in harnesses. Pi may well be the substrate for lots of them. But as coding agents get better, everyone can have a version that fits their needs like a glove.
I went in trying to earn why Pi was such a good harness and did not learn anything. I’m really curious to learn why someone might consider it to be 10x better than Claude Code.
> Pi is Lindy ↗. It’s been around for a year and has arguably the biggest developer community across all harnesses. It’s here to stay.
I switched from Claude code to pi about two months ago and can’t imagine having to go back.
However, this is very much a “build what you need” type of harness. You have to be willing to use other people’s extensions or build/vibe your own before the harness is useful.
Why I find pi better:
- multi-provider/inference API support out of the box
- greater visibility into token flow/usage
- minimal system prompt
- no hand holding/decisions made for you on what your agents can/cannot do
- extremely customizable
- stable, minimal bugs in the base harness that I’ve experienced
- minimal feature bloat
It’s a great harness for someone who wants extreme control and adaptability. I don’t recommend it to my peers and colleagues who aren’t into tinkering.
Claude code is bloated af, super slow and doesn't give better results the most harnesses. Using codex, claude code and omp back to back makes it painfully clear.
The only place showing some numbers is https://frontierharness.org/ but it isn't really up to date, it's easy to test yourself though
Tau is kind of taken as a name, BTW, by the Python harness from Huggingface. And I do agree Pi is great, but what makes it great is the back-end (pi-durable, pi-ai, etc.).
I've been working on https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw for most of the year, as well as https://github.com/rcarmo/gi and https://github.com/rcarmo/go-ai (as ports of pi and pi-ai/durable/etc., plus 3 or 4 pi-durable add-ons for Obsidian and other desktop apps) and the internals of pi are a grand thing indeed, because it was designed from the outset to be able to extend itself (which many people miss, because many people confuse the harness with the TUI).
Why the downvotes? Are people completely oblivious to https://github.com/huggingface/tau ? That far removed from the fact that the harness is not the TUI?
I don't love the attempt to clarify the term "harness" or the analogy.
"Engine" works well as the model. The car is the harness.
Pushing back further (etymologically):
A horse is the model. The harness connects the horse to the coach/wagon, where the user sits.
Multiple horses may be connected in parallel.
Maybe oxen (different models) are connected for certain jobs, which require a harness appropriate for the workload.
I agree that harness, like agent, is a hype word and is often part of word soup. It's been at least a year now (an eternity in the AI wars) where the frontier model releases are just one factor we are using and weighing against competitors, and things I would put under the "harness" category matter as much or more.
I agree that pi is very good, don’t agree that it is the last harness (I have written 4 harnesses myself this year, fantastic experience.)
I mostly use local models. I use pi with the strongest models my 64g mac can handle, and for fast light work I use ‘pool’ with Laguna 2.1 XS 6 bit quant. I am happy :-)
I'm sure there are many more harnesses like Pi. Clai[0] (which I've written) is one of them. We also have hax[1] and aichat [2]. I made some additional comparisons here[3].
At the end of the day, it's quite easy to write together a bespoke agentic harness. So I'm sure there are countless additional ones. You don't really need a lib/open source one at all. Just make it write itself.
> Sure, there are certain features [....] but I don’t see how those couldn’t become part of Pi eventually, either natively or via plugins.
No. I'm done with npm-style dependency sprawl and the supply chain nightmares. Done with plugins, extensions, marketplaces with "install at your own risk" disclaimers.
Give me a opinionated monolith by somebody who has something at stake and doesn't externalize these costs, i.e. a corporation.
Maybe once we live in a world with lean-verified wasm-sandboxed provable-secure software we can get back to installing software written by randos on the internet.
Nah, pi to other harnesses is like archos to other distros: if you like spending your time tweaking and customizing the tool itself rather than doing the work, it will be the perfect match, that, plus it’s turning into a cult-like, exactly like archos. OMP is too convoluted with features that also resemble an old linux distro (can’t remember its name, i think ultimate) where the creator tries to shove all features in there, i remember that distro had all programs preinstalled plus all themes and everything, same with omp, plus omp terminal ui is ugly and behave badly if you resized the window, it feels like a hacky project. What’s really needed in any good harness: multiple providers, efficient on tokens, load skills, easy export of sessions, fast with clean ui, and open to customization if you needed with addons.
HN ignored it at 50 stars, 100, 200, 300, 400, about to hit 500. Three or four weeks in, Pullboard is a personal software factory, and people here still think it is about "agent orchestration." It is way past that. Vibe coding is dead.
To be blunt: This is just an advertisement, right? If you had fleshed out what the big difference is supposed to be between your framework and a harness it might have seemed worthwhile, like this it seems completely off-topic.
>LLMs change everything around us, how we manipulate the world, and how we get the signals back.
This is sounds a little too grandiose for me. Our physical lives at least seem quite unchanged. If you don't produce code or papers for a living you might even succeed in not thinking about LLMs at all. The "signals" we're getting have certainly multiplied and increased in amplitude, though.
Regarding Pi: If hands-off code production is the future wouldn't a harness with subagents be the obvious choice? I personally enjoy minimalism in software, if only for aesthetic reasons, but even then: Can't you spin up your own bespoke version easily?
I don't think we've seen the last of anything in 2026/27. Lots of interesting projects are yet to start. I'd bet a good amount of money that some of the next Google/Microsoft-sized businesses will come from ideas in the AI harness/tooling space that no one has even noticed yet. No one is building them today, well, not exactly anyways.
And no one will see it coming except that one person in some remote part of the world (I don't say the US because, post-LLMs, I hardly think there's anything unique to US tech anymore. The best part was the sheer technical talent in the US, but that's worth a lot less with modern models and systems).
So no, I don't think we're anywhere near the end of innovation just yet. These will be some fun times, and I don't think the current way of building stuff will last too long. We'll definitely have better tools and ways of doing stuff, or so I hope. Keyboards have honestly lasted a lot longer than I would've expected, even though we've had STT tech for decades now.
Even today, office memes aside, it's just easier to type things out instead of speaking. For most people, typing is faster or fast enough anyway. Except when I'm on my phone.
Agree it feels super early for a lot of these tools. Don't think we have even scratched the surface of what working with LLMs will look like in 10 years. Just think about how many user interfaces can be completely replaced.
> Just think about how many user interfaces can be completely replaced.
Which ones? I don't see a single interface that can be replaced reliably. Complimentary maybe, but definitely not replaced. Would be interested to hear your opinion. It seems that even coding harnesses are a poor replacement for an ide. Drastically less information and if you think code doesn't even need to be read to be understood... Well, I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on that one. I think it needs to be engaged with at least as much as it was when written. Reading is the bare minimum.
> The best part was the sheer technical talent in the US
This is just nonsense. What set the US apart is its mass and ecosystem.
What is just a good idea in any other country gets 10k users as a side project. Whereas in the US it can more easily become a multi-million VC backed 'homogenous' product for its massive population/market.
Popular tech is rarely the best at a technical level (even when the best is developed within the US), it just has more opportunity to acquire weight and momentum to become the default choice for a problem-space.
> This is just nonsense. What set the US apart is its mass and ecosystem.
That's only in post 2010s period, aka post apps and social media.
The boom in 80s/90s/2000s all of it kicked off from the deep technical know-how that rest of the planet just didn't have.
People can feel free to disagree, but they are really lying to themselves if they think anywhere else on the planet there was the sheer amount of tech talent as US until even 2010s.
Things have changed since and US is now largely valued because of it's large market and stuff, hence the off-shoring of so much of the technical and even advanced work.
But this was not the case before. With AI pushing the cost of building stuff to near 0 I don't see why you even need the US market to scale up an idea enough to prove viability. Sure the company might have to move to US, but there is no reason for it to be built in US anymore.
Invoking the Lindy Effect to proclaim that something that’s a year old will last forever is pretty funny. What the Lindy effect actually predicts is that something that’s a year old is pretty likely to only last one more year before being replaced.
My guess is we see a cambrian explosion in harnesses. Pi may well be the substrate for lots of them. But as coding agents get better, everyone can have a version that fits their needs like a glove.
> everyone can have a version that fits their needs like a glove
That's kind of the point of Pi in the first place.
I went in trying to earn why Pi was such a good harness and did not learn anything. I’m really curious to learn why someone might consider it to be 10x better than Claude Code.
> Pi is Lindy ↗. It’s been around for a year and has arguably the biggest developer community across all harnesses. It’s here to stay.
BTW this isn’t what Lindy really means
I switched from Claude code to pi about two months ago and can’t imagine having to go back.
However, this is very much a “build what you need” type of harness. You have to be willing to use other people’s extensions or build/vibe your own before the harness is useful.
Why I find pi better:
- multi-provider/inference API support out of the box
- greater visibility into token flow/usage
- minimal system prompt
- no hand holding/decisions made for you on what your agents can/cannot do
- extremely customizable
- stable, minimal bugs in the base harness that I’ve experienced
- minimal feature bloat
It’s a great harness for someone who wants extreme control and adaptability. I don’t recommend it to my peers and colleagues who aren’t into tinkering.
> I don’t recommend it to my peers and colleagues who aren’t into tinkering.
For them/me, omp (https://omp.sh/) is excellent and batteries-included. Pi = Linux kernel, omp = Linux/GNU.
Claude code is bloated af, super slow and doesn't give better results the most harnesses. Using codex, claude code and omp back to back makes it painfully clear.
The only place showing some numbers is https://frontierharness.org/ but it isn't really up to date, it's easy to test yourself though
VSCode is the last editor, pi is the last harness, blah, blah blah
Tau is kind of taken as a name, BTW, by the Python harness from Huggingface. And I do agree Pi is great, but what makes it great is the back-end (pi-durable, pi-ai, etc.).
I've been working on https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw for most of the year, as well as https://github.com/rcarmo/gi and https://github.com/rcarmo/go-ai (as ports of pi and pi-ai/durable/etc., plus 3 or 4 pi-durable add-ons for Obsidian and other desktop apps) and the internals of pi are a grand thing indeed, because it was designed from the outset to be able to extend itself (which many people miss, because many people confuse the harness with the TUI).
Why the downvotes? Are people completely oblivious to https://github.com/huggingface/tau ? That far removed from the fact that the harness is not the TUI?
I don't love the attempt to clarify the term "harness" or the analogy.
"Engine" works well as the model. The car is the harness.
Pushing back further (etymologically): A horse is the model. The harness connects the horse to the coach/wagon, where the user sits. Multiple horses may be connected in parallel. Maybe oxen (different models) are connected for certain jobs, which require a harness appropriate for the workload.
I agree that harness, like agent, is a hype word and is often part of word soup. It's been at least a year now (an eternity in the AI wars) where the frontier model releases are just one factor we are using and weighing against competitors, and things I would put under the "harness" category matter as much or more.
I agree that pi is very good, don’t agree that it is the last harness (I have written 4 harnesses myself this year, fantastic experience.)
I mostly use local models. I use pi with the strongest models my 64g mac can handle, and for fast light work I use ‘pool’ with Laguna 2.1 XS 6 bit quant. I am happy :-)
this article is hyperbolic, but pi is very nice, if a little raw for people used to more professional commercial harnesses
i am vibing a harness extension on top of it for our students called catatui:
https://msu.github.io/catatui/
that works w/our free-for-students-and-staff internal models & provides some student-oriented features, and it has worked very well
What will break pi is that everybody is going to think themselves clever by calling their extension/frontend/fork 'tau'.
I'm sure there are many more harnesses like Pi. Clai[0] (which I've written) is one of them. We also have hax[1] and aichat [2]. I made some additional comparisons here[3].
At the end of the day, it's quite easy to write together a bespoke agentic harness. So I'm sure there are countless additional ones. You don't really need a lib/open source one at all. Just make it write itself.
[0]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai [1]: https://github.com/OleksandrChekhovskyi/hax [2]: https://github.com/sigoden/aichat [3]: https://www.clai.chat/compare/
Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man.
___
What is the point of this blog post, declaring a problem solved with.. uh.. authority taking from.. uh.. uuuuuh. Anyway.
Is pi good? I guess? The post does mention some of its qualities.
Is it a sensible take to extrapolate this from that? I do not think so.
Intellectually unstimulating.
> Sure, there are certain features [....] but I don’t see how those couldn’t become part of Pi eventually, either natively or via plugins.
No. I'm done with npm-style dependency sprawl and the supply chain nightmares. Done with plugins, extensions, marketplaces with "install at your own risk" disclaimers.
Give me a opinionated monolith by somebody who has something at stake and doesn't externalize these costs, i.e. a corporation.
Maybe once we live in a world with lean-verified wasm-sandboxed provable-secure software we can get back to installing software written by randos on the internet.
Nah, pi to other harnesses is like archos to other distros: if you like spending your time tweaking and customizing the tool itself rather than doing the work, it will be the perfect match, that, plus it’s turning into a cult-like, exactly like archos. OMP is too convoluted with features that also resemble an old linux distro (can’t remember its name, i think ultimate) where the creator tries to shove all features in there, i remember that distro had all programs preinstalled plus all themes and everything, same with omp, plus omp terminal ui is ugly and behave badly if you resized the window, it feels like a hacky project. What’s really needed in any good harness: multiple providers, efficient on tokens, load skills, easy export of sessions, fast with clean ui, and open to customization if you needed with addons.
HN ignored it at 50 stars, 100, 200, 300, 400, about to hit 500. Three or four weeks in, Pullboard is a personal software factory, and people here still think it is about "agent orchestration." It is way past that. Vibe coding is dead.
https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard
To be blunt: This is just an advertisement, right? If you had fleshed out what the big difference is supposed to be between your framework and a harness it might have seemed worthwhile, like this it seems completely off-topic.
All this shilling and promoting a "software factory" and you decided to write it in javascript. I won't infect my repos with an npm mess.
>Vive coding is dead
Yet its own README says "vive code a real product".