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This is an incredibly reflexively contrarian comment

This is factually false.

A contrarian is "A person who likes or tends to express a contradicting viewpoint, especially from one held by a majority of people, usually because of nonconformity or spite."

The post I replied to is literally being contrarian:

> Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion.

Meanwhile, my post was not being contrarian in the slightest. I didn't offer a contradictory viewpoint - I provided factual information and context to dispel false claims/misinformation in the post I was responding to (e.g. the claim "the standard C-p and C-n bindings don't work" is highly misleading/false because you can trivially rebind them), and the opinions I provided were completely orthogonal to the opinion expressed ("I suspect that if the harness was written in Lua [...] you would have far more issues with it."

I expressed no opinion either for or against "Given all the hype, I was a bit underwhelmed by Pi. It definitely has some good ideas around customization, but it annoyed me in many little ways."

It always surprises me when someone so confidently makes an objectively incorrect statement when they could have spent 30 seconds looking up the definition of a word and realized that they were in the wrong.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/contrarian

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/contrari...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contrarian

> It took the same amount of time (3 seconds) as cursor-agent and codex on my machine, which isn't particularly high-spec.

A simple CLI tool should start instantly and lazily load anything that can't be loaded instantly.

> Being contrarian for the sake of it is not good form.

Why would you say that? Is it good form to post that someone is being contrarian for the sake of it? OP’s comment looks like constructive criticism with plenty of good points.

> It took the same amount of time (3.5 seconds) as cursor-agent and codex on my machine.

So what? Nobody is pretending that these are minimalist. Codex is 1.2M of Rust LOC.

> which necessarily means that you have some powerful and expressive extension language, ideally the one the harness was written in.

Don’t be silly, JS is a joke. I was going to check Pi out, but now that I know it’s based on a shitty stack, I’m staying the fuck away from it. I don’t have the RAM to spare.

> If these are your complaints, then this is one of the strongest endorsements of Pi that I've ever seen. I think I'm bookmarking this comment.

> good form

>> Being contrarian for the sake of it is not good form.

> Why would you say that?

Because it's true.

> Is it good form to post that someone is being contrarian for the sake of it?

It's orthogonal to good form - it's preserving the value of HN, which is meant for intellectual curiosity and not knee-jerk emotional reactions, like your comment.

> OP’s comment looks like constructive criticism with plenty of good points.

You must have missed the very first line in their comment where they said:

> Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion.

...which is literally admitting to being reflexively contrarian.

Additionally, their criticisms were extremely shallow and/or misleading, and I addressed every one.

> So what?

Nobody is inconvenienced by a 3.5s startup time of an application meant to run for hours or days. That's a trivial complaint akin to arguing about the color of paint on a bikeshed.

> Don’t be silly, JS is a joke. I was going to check Pi out, but now that I know it’s based on a shitty stack, I’m staying the fuck away from it. I don’t have the RAM to spare.

You're just operating based on emotion and not a state of reason or intellectual curiosity. And I highly doubt that you "were going to check Pi out" - this wording follows the pattern of fabricating falsehoods out rage due to an opinion expressed that you didn't like.

>> If these are your complaints, then this is one of the strongest endorsements of Pi that I've ever seen. I think I'm bookmarking this comment.

>> good form

Did you forget to make a point here?

> Nobody is inconvenienced by a 3.5s startup time of an application meant to run for hours or days.

For the record, I measure acceptable latency in milliseconds. I think it has something to do with my brain.

> which is literally admitting to being reflexively contrarian.

They’re very clearly stating that they’re expressing their opinion because it is underrepresented.

> Did you forget to make a point here?

No.

> For the record, I measure acceptable latency in milliseconds. I think it has something to do with my brain.

That's a personal preference thing. You're not really being inconvenienced.

> They’re very clearly stating that they’re expressing their opinion because it is underrepresented.

That's literally the dictionary definition of being contrarian:

"A person who likes or tends to express a contradicting viewpoint, especially from one held by a majority of people, usually because of nonconformity or spite."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/contrarian

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/contrari...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contrarian

I suggest consulting the dictionary before using terms you're not familiar with.

> No.

If you're going to copy-paste random pieces of text without making a point, you probably shouldn't be on HN. HN is for intellectual curiosity and debate, not Reddit-esque expressions of randomness conflated wuth humor.

> you probably shouldn't be on HN. HN is for intellectual curiosity and debate, not Reddit-esque expressions of randomness conflated wuth humor.

Thank you for this beautiful insight. Just to clarify, you consider yourself an intellectually curious, HN-worthy individual?

I seriously don't get the hate for JS/TS. it's a lot more ergonomic than Lua.

just yesterday I saw someone claim they'd rather learn COBOL and use it than use JS

it's ridiculous imo.

the ram usage is one thing sure, but then it also means you can't use Claude Code because it also runs on top of JS.

so I guess we should all stop using Claude Code, right? cause it's "based on a shitty stack"

Consider this:

- I regularly have 10+ instances of my harness running or idling on my laptop.

- My laptop is often at near-100% CPU and memory usage due to the (irreducible) cost of the development tools and environment.

- I often (50% of the time) downclock my laptop’s CPU to 1-2 GHz to save battery and/or reduce noise and thermals while charging.

- I sometimes run my harness on machines that are low-power, low-RAM single-board computers.

If my harness was written in JS, this would be both annoying in terms of responsiveness and limiting in terms of how much work I can do in parallel. This is why using JS for serious software is a... subpar decision.

> but then it also means you can't use Claude Code because it also runs on top of JS.

Correct. I don’t use Claude Code.

That's fair. I think with a lot of these harnesses they didn't really think people would be running so many instances of them at once

I think for claude code it really would be best if they made it native, but for plugins I think JS wins, because it's just a lot more easier for most to write plugins in that.

from my POV the performance used to be bad but it's pretty good now, every now and then though it'll start just growing in memory usage and needs to be restarted every now and then. so if you'd 10x that then I could see it really limiting workflows, especially with SBCs

The claims being made here are fallacious in three extremely basic ways.

First, "I regularly have 10+ instances of my harness running or idling on my laptop" implicitly asserts that you need that many instances running at once.

You don't. You can have a single instance running that handles your sessions in parallel.

Second, "I sometimes run my harness on machines that are low-power, low-RAM single-board computers." presumes the whole agent has to run on the SBC itself. It doesn't. There are agents (including Pi, which makes this even sillier) that can run their tool calls in a separate process/host, meaning that the agent can live on your development machine while the tiny tool-call daemon runs on the SBC.

Finally, "If my harness was written in JS, this would be both annoying in terms of responsiveness and limiting in terms of how much work I can do in parallel." could only be written out of a complete lack of understanding about how harnesses are actually implemented.

Agent harnesses don't do very much. The limiting factor is not the harness itself, but in the filesystem (reads, writes, file searches, greps), the computational tool calls (compilers, linters, evaluating the program), and the LLM API itself.

Your arguments against Javascript appear to be based on fallacies, lack of understanding of technology, and strong emotions against JS rather than actual fact.

This is getting silly, I can’t tell whether you are kidding, never launched a Node-based app, or never checked htop.

> that can run their tool calls in a separate process/host

That indeed seems like a simple and elegant setup. I can’t recall a single instance of using a harness when I didn’t want the tool calls to be local, though. Why would I be SSHing into a SBC just to run the agent back on my laptop?

> You can have a single instance running that handles your sessions in parallel.

Sounds even more elegant! Presumably, they communicate via HTTP?

> implicitly asserts that you need that many instances running at once.

I don’t need to, but I can. That’s the entire point, in case you’re still missing it.

> Your arguments against Javascript appear to be based on fallacies, lack of understanding of technology, and strong emotions against JS rather than actual fact.

How beautifully ironic.

> This is getting silly, I can’t tell whether you are kidding, never launched a Node-based app, or never checked htop.

You're very much operating based on emotion rather than reason. That's fine in general, but it's not OK for HN, which is not a place to blast out your emotions and try to assert that your opinion is factually true by getting maximally angry about it.

> That indeed seems like a simple and elegant setup. I can’t recall a single instance of using a harness when I didn’t want the tool calls to be local, though. Why would I be SSHing into a SBC just to run the agent back on my laptop?

You don't understand how harnesses work. Let me explain: in a harness, the tools that the harness provides are the only way for the agent to interact with its environment, and as such, if the harness is run on one host, and the tools on another, the agent's perspective is that it is running on the second host. This is effectively true modulo some small set of scenarios that are mostly irrelevant in the case of "I'm SSHing into an SBC" (e.g. the harness logic and LLM API calls would both be happening on the SBC, which you definitely don't want when you're resource-constrained).

> Sounds even more elegant! Presumably, they communicate via HTTP?

No. Why would you think that? Again, I don't think you understand how harnesses work.

> I don’t need to, but I can. That’s the entire point, in case you’re still missing it.

That's a useless point, if so, akin to saying "I want to have Vim running at address 0x00000001beef0000 in physical memory" - you're conflating use-case (needing a large number of agents running in parallel so you can work on things in parallel) with implementation detail (having a large number of separate processes running on your computer).

> How beautifully ironic.

I'm meeting every single one of your technical arguments and factual inaccuracies (e.g. your misunderstanding of the word "contrarian"), and you're continuing to get very angry at Javascript. I don't think there's any irony here.