Hacker News Reader

Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

Cynics on HN easily dismiss AI service wrappers (and many of them are in fact overblown and not worth their own code). But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy. The biggest issue is that model providers also see what the community likes and often move on with their own offerings that are tailored to their own models, potentially at the training stage. So even if you have the best harness for something today, unless you are also a frontier LLM provider, there's zero guarantee you will still be relevant in the future. More like the opposite.

View on HN

> But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.

true, but its not worth $60 billion fucking quid.

it's insanity.

the whole thing is driven by irrational stock market investers who NEED ai to be the thing that saves the world.

they're betting everything on it.

It's not like someone paid $60 billion for a product the way you pay for bananas at the store. They invested a much smaller amount and essentially bought an option to acquire. And even if you don't believe the company's assets are worth the current valuation, an acquisition can still make sense if you believe that valuation will go up further. And if they actually do acquire, it will probably still not be in cash. They'll just be swapping stocks. That is essentially how all startup funding works. There is nothing strange about this. It merely reached new dimensions thanks to AI.

I mean yes, you are right, but they also paid $10 billion for that option. Which is also far too much for a harness.

I mean they doubled revenue from $1B/yr to $2B in a month.

At some point it can be valued as a high growth business, the code that backs it is almost irrelevant if the business is strong.

trusting a startup to accurately report its revenue in this market is about the dumbest thing you can do

IIRC, it was $2B annualized. Which means nothing. Also, their expenses will be way north of that.

> (...) writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.

This. They are after the harness engineering experience of the Cursor people, I'd assume the they want to absorb all that into Grok's offerings.

The value and the room for innovation on the harness side seems to be underestimated.

Oddly the harness also affects model training, since even GLM/Z.ai for example train (I suspect) their model on the actual Claude Code harness. So the choises made by harness engineers affects the model. For Kimi/Moonshot and OpenAI the company makes their own harness. Alibaba uses Gemini.

Very interesting dynamics.

There are plenty of harder things in the world and very few are worth 60B.

Something being harder and attributing value to that makes no sense. Sure a big moat is important for value but "difficult to do" is just a unidimensional angle.

Showing naked butt on the internet seems easy.

Earning millions that way is much more complicated.

Isn't Codex TUI available for free though? Besides others like Pi and OpenCode of course.

It can use local/oss models, but it doesn't make it simple to do (easiest with ollama) and it's not clear what else you 'lose' by making that choice.

If you had a really good (big) local model, maybe it's an option, but on the more common smaller (<32b) models, it will have similar problems in looping, losing context, etc. in my experience.

It's a nice TUI, but the ecosystem is what makes it good.

mac studio 512gb versions are entirely sold out for this reason precisely

"But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy."

It is surprisingly easy to do it once someone else has done the work. Increasingly that's the nature of AI-based software engineering: point it at an existing tool and ask it to carefully duplicate features until it has parity. As you pointed out, frontier LLM companies happen to be well positioned to sell the resulting products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com