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Comment by maelito | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, what is a harness, compared to a complete Web LLm "chat" like Mistral Vibe ?

If you're using Mistral Vibe installed on your computer, that is a harness. Vibe is one of many AI harnesses.

In general, a harness is something that lets your AI use tools on your computer and lets it work independently while you walk away. (Very simplified definition, not all harnesses are that automated.)

It's a long time since I tried Vibe, but when I did it was one of the worst. Back then it had broken support for MCP or computer use and other tools people now regard as near essential in AI. Hopefully Vibe is better now. Sadly Mistral are a long way behind.

Mistral Vibe lets you use GLM-5.3 by default now. So it's a very capable model, for a cheap monthly fee. The Web version is excellent : tried yesterday on a simple search, results were way more informative than ChatGPT.

But yes, it's sad that they don't release models anymore.

Thanks for the definition !

I've been with Mistral for a while now. Their hosted GLM-5.3 has been a game changer in Vibe CLI over the last couple of weeks. The Vibe CLI harness has been improving for a while, but is still a little sluggish and I feel lacks token minimisation strategies. I recently changed to Maki and have been reasonably satisfied so far.

However, I also use the Mistral Vibe chat in my browser. I think they only switched to GLM-3.5 here a couple of days ago (https://docs.mistral.ai/resources/changelogs). It'd be nice if Mistral had a desktop client, but I have Goose installed which I have no real complaints about.

The whole thing around the model that handles system prompt, skills, agents, cache, etc. For example codex, claude code, pi, oh-my-pi, ...

Funny that you ask this question but are comparing it to a seriously niche product. Harnesses are mainstream and the one you’re using isn’t so much.

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