Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexfortin | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what are the reasons to use Claude Code anymore when there are so many other (allegedly better) OpenSource harnesses out there?

Personally I've been using https://pi.dev for long and never looked back.

View on HN

Because you basically get a discount to use claude code via subscription when using an anthropic model, compared to what you pay via api billing with another harness

Understood.

Personally that's actually another good reason to boycott Anthropic: beside the fact I perceive their models as (at best) marginally better than the ones I'm used to (Z.ai glm-5.3-flash, DeepSeek Flash v4.1), they even force me to use their bloated harness. They are not even open weights and iirc they're even encrypting chain of thoughts now? Litterally, from my perspective there seems to be no reason whatsoever to choose any of the leading US providers, they're not even competing on price.

I too am using GLM-5.3-flash in Pi and I've yet to encounter a scenario it couldn't handle. And the pricing is just incredible, I've handed it a previously unseen codebase, asked it to analyse it and build a new feature, came back after it had done so and the API cost was a fraction of a cent. It's $0.5/1M output tokens on OpenRouter.

If I really need to, I can escalate a task to Opus at $25/1M, and the results are good, but not 5000% as good.

Indeed! It's ludicrous how much I can still squeze out of a 9USD/month lite sub with Z.ai, it's beyond me how these US LLM providers are still managing to keep their evaluations so high... they seem to have the highest prices for the poorest UX, e.g. security gates which don't seem to benefit anyone (see HuggingFace falling back to GLM-5.x for troubleshooting OpenAI attack), less visibility in the name of anti-distillation protectionism, no harness use flexibility to protect their walled garden, etc.

Doesn't look like pi.dev has anything like auto-mode. They tout running in a container, which you should do regardless, but the scope of soundness that has as a security plan is limited. If some information is in the container, and there's any way for it to get out, eventually it will. The scope of usage that can be covered without that being a problem is leaves a lot uncovered.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com