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  • Hacker News
  • I too was frustrated with needing npm and slow startups or huge rust compile times for agents. I tried getting agents to write a tool like this with proper raw mode content pasting/ interruptions, but they just kept screwing it up without a framework like ratatui, so I wrote one in c by hand https://gist.github.com/fourlexboehm/a60e4ef9306744483731cd1... the only dependency is libcurl.

    This binary is ~40kb and uses much less ram than fx.

    by alexboehm
  • Very clean, thank you for posting!
    by smy20011
  • "it can do everything Claude code can do" This is a tad bit hyperbolic.
    by handfuloflight
  • I don’t want another coding agent. I would have to be unemployed to try all new software that pops up everywhere. :)

    And every says it is the one :)

    by sixtyj
  • In 9 lines of python: (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006862 )

    import json,sys;from subprocess import getoutput as sh;from urllib.request import Request as R,urlopen url=sys.argv[1];h=[];b=dict(model="gpt-5.6",input=h,tools=[dict(type="custom",name="sh")]) while p:=input("> "): h+=[dict(role="user",content=p)];H={"Content-Type":"application/json"} while True: o=(r:=json.load(urlopen(R(url,json.dumps(b).encode(),H))))["output"] h+=o;c=[i for i in o if i["type"]=="custom_tool_call"];z=r["usage"]["total_tokens"]/10500 if not c:print(o[-1]["content"][0]["text"],f'\n[{z:06.3f}%]');break h+=[dict(type="custom_tool_call_output",call_id=i["call_id"],output=sh(i["input"])) for i in c]

    by JSR_FDED
  • Will dive in later to see how its contribution/extension model differs from Pi. Pi is great for a lot of things but has a larger memory footprint and start time than this claims to have so it would be interesting to compare the two.
    by hankbond
  • Local inference? I see no other way than to sign up for a vercel account, so pass.
    by abhikul0
  • Agreed, I was excited about this until I found

      To get started, sign in with Vercel:

  fx login
    in the README on Github.
    by codethief
  • agreed, with Vercel as the only inference provider option, this project is useless
    by elux101
  • I wonder how long will the "curl my arbitrary script and pipe it to bash" will continue being a delivery method.
    by vhantz
  • How is it different from any other installation method?
    by johnfn
  • There will always be people that need to install software that isn't available via package manager (or whatever other blessed source your platform of choice uses). Any solution you come up with will have the same caveat emptor as "curl | sh".
    by 10000truths
  • Not long. We are transitioning to your LLM curling an arbitrary markdown file and doing whatever it says.
    by roywiggins
  • If it isn't still common practice 40 years from now (8/18/2066), I'll give the first person to challenge me and cite this comment $1 USD (or equivalent value in the One-World Order-issued omni-currency that we will probably be using by then).
    by cfiggers
  • I'm not in the tech industry. Could someone explain why there are so many new coding agents, and why they're commonly upvoted on HackerNews? It seems like there's a new one in the top 10 every other day.
    by SmashDan
  • Because they're valueless and trivial to produce, but trends are gonna trend.
    by zerotolerance
  • When a new technique or capability arrives on the tech scene, there's a point in the invention-to-diffusion story when the new thing becomes accessible (e.g. cheap and/or easy) enough for a broader audience of developers to experiment with it... but before anyone's figured out best practices, let alone polished products/projects, or calcified around a market leader.

    So you get a Cambrian explosion of weird little projects. Ultimately, one of them will probably become the "market" leader... or at least the market default.

    Right now there's a lot of agent harnesses and sandbox projects floating about.

    Fun examples from the past: text editors, window managers, IRC clients, blogging engines (first static, then dynamic, then static again), Twitter clients... every programming language community has weird clusters of library/framework duplication in their history...

    Sometimes these projects take on a rite of passage flavour... like, as every Jedi builds their own lightsaber, every developer builds their own... blog? That used to be the obvious one. Less so these days.

    by jdub
  • It's a brand new type of software. Nobody knows what the best way to do it is so a lot of people are trying stuff out, and a lot of people are interested in new ideas.
    by roywiggins
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory
    by rglover
  • Because we're actively exploring the best way to remove any need to deal with code, and make it so that you don't need any real talent to make a computer do things for anyone.

    We haven't quite hit on the right formula yet, but people are very excited by the possibility.

    by a2ff6eeb0
  • Hacker news generally follows trends, and this is the current trend.

    The discussion around coding agents nowadays is steering towards harnesses (which is probably a better description of what this is). "Agent" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting and has become a bit of a catch-all term to describe a model + harness + tooling + prompt + some other things that I've probably not thought about. The harness is a part that's being explored more as many believe it's where we can get some better performance out of the models.

    This one in particular is from Vercel who provide a service to use models, so they have a vested interest in providing a harness.

    by chrysoprace
  • Because a lot of people are writing their own to get a tool that they understand and can manipulate as they like. So they like to share them and see what other people have done to learn from. As a community we are still very far from coming to a consensus on what a good harness looks like and the only way, IMO, to get a good feel for it is to write your own.
    by eikenberry
  • It's basically just a relatively simple to create piece of software that's important to get right (since you use it so much), can be made by many different design philosophies (maximal vs. minimal, customizability, etc.), and has very few good standards around it as of yet.
    by odo1242
  • It does looks really interesting and definitely something I'll check out, but (genuine question), should "agent" and "agent harness" be used interchangeably as it is on here? It describes itself as an agent harness, but the tagline is "tiny, open, native coding agent".

    I'm not sure harness is the right word either, but that seems to be what the industry has settled on so I'll concede on that, but surely the agent is the thing doing the work (which I guess is the model, or an instance of the model which is why agent is different?), whereas the harness is how the user interacts with the agent. We've had ways to describe that relationship before; client and server, frontend and backend, but again, I'll concede that the shiny new thing doesn't want to use boring old terminology, but I think some consistency and logic in the shiny new terminology is pretty important

    That isn't specifically about fx of course, more of a general industry complaint

    by bodge5000
  • harness + llm = agent
    by stellalo
  • "Harness" should describe the overall system. The user interactions are increasingly negligible (due to model routing, adaptive reasoning, etc). "Agents" are the tool lists/settings provided to the model, etc.
    by alansaber
  • Maybe ”agent shell” could be a better term for harness. But it’s pretty overloaded..
    by kzrdude
  • Harness = the software the agent runs on. This is plain old software. You can trust it as much as any software. Agent = the thing that runs on the harness. It cannot be trusted because it is driven by an LLM
    by cramforce
  • I personally like the way Scion breaks it down into

    - model

    - harness (tools/config)

    - agent (live/running)

    https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/scion/concepts/

    Scion allows for multiple configurations of a harness, allowing you to configure the same tool differently based on what you are doing, particularly important when you want to restrict permissions.

    https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/scion/supported-harnes...

    for the unfamiliar, Scion is an OpenClaw like platform from a Google dev, not supported or sponsored by the company

    by verdverm
  • I think "harness" is a thing, the code/binary, and "agent" is a process, an instantiated run of that code/binary with a given LLM/env, etc.

    So its like, "GTA 6" as the disc vs. the specific game you're in the middle of being chased by cops, harness vs agent.

    In practice they're intertwined and it becomes hard not to use the terms somewhat interchangeably, but "you ask the agent how the harness works" vs. the other way around, clearly.

    by amdahl