Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- We are talking about the process but not the result. I think the results will speak for themselves.by _pdp_
- It is what I also keep telling everyone. The tools need to be shaped after your work and shouldn't precede it.by flessner
- I don't understand why no one has tried to make a harness without full shell access yet.
It would be so much safer.
by andunie - sandboxing?by adverbly
- That exist?
"permission": { "bash": "deny" }
Or something equivalent in any agentic editor of your choice.
by tokai - I haven't tried this but sounds like https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os ?by abecedarius
- Is that the harness' job? It seems to me the best place for sandboxing is at the OS level (i.e. running the harness inside a container with correct access configured).by skohan
- If you are using any of the agents without config, do yourself a favor and invest in any config library that implements SPACE[0]
It will save you a ton of time and you won't be tied to fable costs
[0] Search, Plan, Assert, Code, Evaluate. Obras superpowers, Matt pococks skills, and the nori high autonomy skillset all have this built in
by theahura - This guy knows harnesses!! I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on dsh(deepseek harness), where everything is a plugin. I read an article where the author described it as a motherboar in the Mobo combo purchases we use to do to save money, with the processor(deepseek), being replaceable by other llms but shipped with it by default. Did you evaluate it as a possible replacement? If not, why not?? In my nondev brain, it looks revolutionary, the equivalent of the x86, to the SoTAs attempt at keeping us in a walled garden similar to apple consumers.by bzmrgonz
- This whole "a single dev can do what teams could" has been true for decades lol.
Plenty of devs developed anything from operating systems, enterprise software or videogames on their own.
I still see no evidence that this has changed significantly.
by epolanski - One will lose the opportunity to develop domain understanding if they do not get into the weeds of thinking through the problem.
I use Claude plan mode to do relatively small changes and even then I find that if I actually try and think through the problem and solve it myself that I find good metaphors that will aid future work, and I will discover tangential issues which are then important to look at.
by liampulles - Do you explicitly ask for metaphors?
I wonder if we need a list of things to tell AI to stay sharp, like this one. Sometimes I tell the model existing design is stupid and then it explains reasoning to me.
by DenisM - LoRA adaptive learning using open-weight models and your own reasoning traces is the thing. The big labs have a mammoth job ahead of them if they want to compete with running your own model - they will basically have to give every single user their own persistent virtual machine. When it's all said and done, I think their only really moat will be as inference/hardware providers. Stripe buying OpenRouter was a very smart bet.by nullbio
- Can you explain what you mean with "LoRA adaptive learning using open-weight models and your own reasoning traces"?by vb-8448
- Author states, “Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams.”
When I, as a single person, can produce a project in one month that would have taken a team of four people three months to produce, why would I care about token cost? I’m now spending $500/month instead of $40,000 month to get the same thing 3x faster. $500 for a project instead of $120,000. (Assumes my cost, $40k is the other three people)
It’s a no-brainer —- use frontier all the time.
by douglee650 - > use frontier all the time
Agreed. You may think that the task is simple, but a brainfart of a dumb model overlooking something can cost you more in time and effort (if you relied on the output of the wrong code and now have to go back to regenerate), that it just doesn't make sense to use non-frontier for anything but hobby projects.
by bonoboTP - My bet is we no longer have the benifit of the doubt. and so taking capital and burning hard is not going to break through into consumer as easily as it did. So I extend the arc of time, tell people I'm a business, focus on giving customer as much free as I can, (probably add the harness to my product), and over time build an affectionate connetion with customers and then remind them I'm a business.by sfryxell
- Have you laid those people off? You still have people on the payroll. If each one of them uses a $500 subscription, you are now spending $42k/month, not $40k.
- "A robot that's a tenth of the speed is still cost effective when it's a hundredth of the price"
-- CPG Grey, Humans Need not Apply. Released over a decade ago.
by s_dev - What I've learned in last week is that a harness is basically a while loop.
In each iteration you make an LLM call, perform some work (e.g. tool call), augment the prompt (append or compact etc.)- not necessarily in that other- and continue.
Until an end condition is satisfied. Then you break out.
by esalman - A pluggable loop with events and hooks.by visarga
- That's the most basic version of a harness. But a harness is really about automating context delivery to the LLM based on your use-case.by skohan
- It's two, actually:
This example has one, but if you add a second one around their example code, and take user input, and there's a basic harness already.
by andai - I've been very happy with Luna but my approach is "many bite sized edits" for which models basically hit saturation a year ago.
(I also tried the "let a massive model make massive changes" approach and am still psychologically recovering from the experience. The codebase may never recover!)
Also, Luna and DSV4 Flash seem to be on par now except Luna is faster and cheaper?
by andai - FWIW I run a clinical analysis backend and directly compared Luna with DSv4 Flash 0731 - DS was a bit ahead, and cheaper even considering it used 40% more tokens.
The exposure to Deepseek made me question the valuation house of cards built on SOTA providers. There are more companies producing competitive and useful models than there are companies producing jet engines for airliners, and not for the lack of trying. China has been trying to make these engines for decades and so far failed (their flagship C919 airliner is using CFM, American/French), but it has produced at least three competitive model companies within 3 years even though they're handicapped by their hardware.
It's simply not that hard, and diminishing returns will, in fact, diminish.
by flyinglizard - > Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams.
Yet the simple blog website static page saying that looks very weird and broken on the desktop firefox.
How large should be a development team to make proper margins in 2026?
by dmantis - Do large development teams care about Firefox?by fastball
- This problem is easily solved. "Check that the blog looks the same in XYZ browsers".
I have LLMs align stuff for me all the time because I'm too lazy. It takes the screenshot, changes the code, code auto reloads and boom, done.
by dingaling911 - > weird and broken
Weird, yes. Broken, I don't think so. Seems to just be a matter of taste.
by lucideer - Looks fine on ff, and the same as other browsers. You sure the issue isn't in your end?by tokai