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Comment by pyrophane | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what peolle are finding with first party vs 3red party harnesses for coding.

Do the first party harnesses really have an advantage when paired with the maker's model?

I hear that often but to me it does not feel like it. I built my own framework around pi.dev harness and run all kind of different LLMs with it. Sometimes also use the vendor harnesses and they don't feel better adapted.

I feel very strongly the first party harnesses don't make sense when essentially every month the Pareto frontier changes as new models get released

I want to use the same consistent working surface across models in the same way I want to use the same text editor across all different languages

One thing I found was tool calling in GLM 5.2 on github using Claude Code was mostly failing then fixing. But I didn't compare to z.ai's harness. (Nothing to do with Deepseek, sorry.)

I use OpenCode and I like knowing the direct token spend for doing tasks. A healthy repo can get a lot done with Luna + fresh context. Then I can spend $1-$2 a day when I'm doing development, and costwise honestly it beats a $200 / month plan.

I also just do a bit of hand-coding to guide the agent still.

I worry the $200 / month plans are loss-leaders encouraging you to maximize token usage to churn out slop, rather than thoughtfully use coding agents in a way that still engages your brain, and produces good software.

i've been using Cascade (a third party harness) since the 3 week period in 2023 when it was hot. I think it's called something else now. Devin? Things got confusing there for a second and I stopped paying attention.

Anyway very happy with it, I use it as a plugin to RubyMine and Webstorm.

One of the primary advantages is being able to choose your model - and it often has free deals for newer models that are running promotions. Whenever I switch to Claude Code it seems clunky. Would rather use Claude with Cascade.

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