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Comment by uxcolumbo | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about the factors that determine why one AI coding harness is better than others. Is it system prompts? Or just personal preference in terms of the UX and there isn't actually a better output between using CC or Pi?

So what makes Pi better than CC? Is it better than OpenCode?

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My experience with harnesses is entirely about UX, personally. You could just use an LLM directly and pipe its output directly into your source files, but that would produce terrible results in practice. Harnesses / agents are just better versions of “curl https://llm.com > source.{py/js/cpp/etc}”, imo

Long term I’m bullish on an open source harness “winning” the foot race, in a similar way that Linux “won” over Windows and MacOS (that is, debatably)

There's a recentish YouTube talk when he introduces the concept and contrasts against those.

My (oversimplified) summary: it's like vim versus an IDE. Good for tinkerers and obsessives who like small, sharp and customisable tools.

> vim versus an IDE is exactly how I describe it to some of my coworkers who are old enough to have used vim.

CC is a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat. If that rocks your boat, go knock yourself out.

Is it better than OpenCode? It's certainly much smaller and doesn't have a client-server architecture - already that is a big win.

You mention the client-server architecture of opencode. Is that a local server or is it calling home to opencode servers?

One of the ideas I like about opencode is the ability to prompt and such from a web browser. So I'm curious if that is the client-server architecture you are talking about, or if it's something else.

For reference, I used replit for some vibe-ish coding for a little bit and really liked that I could easily prompt and view output on my phone when hanging out away from my computer. Or while waiting at the airport for example.

(RIP OG replit by the way. They've pretty much completely pivoted from a REPL to AI, which is pretty hilarious to me given the company name xD)

> One of the ideas I like about opencode is the ability to prompt and such from a web browser. So I'm curious if that is the client-server architecture you are talking about, or if it's something else.

Yes, this is what I meant. And yes it's ok that you like this about opencode :)

> For reference, I used replit for some vibe-ish coding for a little bit and really liked that I could easily prompt and view output on my phone when hanging out away from my computer. Or while waiting at the airport for example.

I use Google Jules and also appreciate being able to nudge it forward when not at the computer. In general I often appreciate when things run on other people's machines. However, if I'm to run a thing on my machines, it better be minimalist!

OpenCode is pretty terrible imo. Not very privacy minded.

I've been considering playing around with opencode. Can you expand on what you mean by this?

The harness or the tool is ok but all the defaults as part of the paid pieces of the tool have really bad privacy decisions. So they offer Zen as a pay as you use credit system with access to the models they think work best with the harness. Their own stealth model in it along with a number of the leading new models are always-on sharing data for training purposes. They don’t make this immediately obvious either you have to click through links on their website to see the breakdown.

I am not usually super privacy minded but if you already made it nonobvious this is happening I don’t really trust the underlying tool.

https://opencode.ai/docs/zen/#privacy

Above is the link. The front page says your privacy is important and says they don’t do training on your data except for the following exceptions which links to this page. Then even their own model is training on your data except there is no opt out. So if you pay for zen and you select one of these models in the tool you have no clue it’s auto training on your data.

Gotcha, thanks. That is a bit sus

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