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Comment by emp17344 | Hacker News Reader

If you saw the Claude Code leak, you’d know the harness is anything but simple. It’s a sprawling, labyrinthine mess, but it’s required to make LLMs somewhat deterministic and useful as tools.

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That’s also because of how Claude Code was written. It doesn’t have to be that way per se.

Hypothesis: it's a sprawling, labyrinthine mess because it was grown at high speed using Claude Code.

There’s a lot of redundancy, because there has to be to make the system useful. It’s a hacked together mess.

It's pretty easy to get determinism with a simple harness for a well-defined set of tasks with the recent models that are post-trained for tool use. CC probably gets some bloat because it tries to do a LOT more; and some bloat because it's grown organically.

>It's pretty easy to get determinism with a simple harness for a well-defined set of tasks with the recent models that are post-trained for tool use.

Do you have a source? Claude Code is the only genetic system that seems to really work well enough to be useful, and it’s equipped with an absolutely absurd amount of testing and redundancy to make it useful.

Should I read that as 'generic system'? Most hard data is with company internal evals, but for the well defined tasks externally it's been pretty easy to spin up a basic tool loop and validate. Did you have something in mind? [I don't necessarily count 'coding' as well-defined in the generic sense, so I suspect we're coming at this from different scopes re: the definition of 'LLMs somewhat deterministic and useful as tools']

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