7 ms·

I think it's more than that. They truly believe Claude Code to be a moat (both the harness and the posttraining) to be a moat. I've been deeply distrustful of

I think it's more than that. They truly believe Claude Code to be a moat (both the harness and the posttraining) to be a moat. I've been deeply distrustful of Anthropic from early early days. They have always been openly disdainful of user feedback. I would not be surprised if later they try to implement more shenanigans to keep people locked into CC.

epistasis 28d ago
Claude Code is quickly becoming an anchor. Every week I marvel at how much worse it gets, how much more essential information is hidden and replaced with bloated useless TUI and rambling tangential responses that hide the useful bits of info behind jargon invented by the agent without ever explaining it to the user. It's like the PMs for Claude Code are reward hacking their own reinforcement learning.
- annzabelle 28d ago
  What tools do you find are better? I have been happy with Claude Code lately, but I haven't explored other options much in over a year. Curious to try something else out if it's less rambling and tangential.
  - dalenw 28d ago
    Not OP but I like OpenCode a lot. But OhMyPi: https://omp.sh/ https://omp.sh/ is also taking off. Personally I didn't like it as much as OpenCode.
    - pixlmint 28d ago
      yeh i tried pi, as a neovim user i naturally like customizability, but with how little i use agents, i want something that just works, which opencode does for me.
  - 8cvor6j844qw_d6 28d ago
    New guidelines that I have seen in a certain place is to configure and update existing CC setups to be CC/Codex agnostic. Plus setting up both allows Claude Code to delegate tasks [1] to Codex to reduce usage. Most are easy to share with symlinks and @agents. https://github.com/openai/codex-plugin-cc https://github.com/openai/codex-plugin-cc
    - andai 28d ago
      Oh my god, that's an official plugin. That's hilarious. I had the same idea last year, when I noticed how much cheaper GPT was for the same tasks, but Claude was still better as a high level "operator". Also cause OpenAI was cool with you calling their sub in an automated way, but Anthropic very much was not (they were banning people at the time).
  - andai 28d ago
    The sub only works in Claude Code itself (unless they changed that rule again?), and all the Chinese models are trained on Claude Code (a bunch of them don't even work in Codex). I use a custom harness, but I constantly hear good things about Pi. EDIT: Checked out Pi and Oh-My-Pi. 250k LoC and 1.5M LoC respectively. Sheesh. How's that for minimalism... Mine's 50. (Lines.) https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/bd50aaa4bdb15f9a4cc8176ee387b212 https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/bd50aaa4bdb15f9a4cc8176ee3... Vendored in my own LLM micro library (100 LoC) so it's 150.[0] There's no parallelism or anything, but I use it for surgical edits and it's much faster and cheaper than the official harnesses for some reason. (Absence of sysprompt bigger than my repo probably helps there...) [0] This one uses OpenRouter so you can use it with any model, but jerry rigged Codex sub version available on demand :) --- I also have a ultra turbo bloated version (500 lines... need to strip it down a bit!) which has autorun files (for grep-based context injection), notification (frog croak when agent done, etc.) Watch this space!
    - agentdev001 28d ago
      They did walk that back, you are able to use an Anthropic login in a non-anthropic harness. (For now.) (Edit: I failed too mention, using a different harness with a CC/Anthropic subscription bumps you up to the pay-per-token rate.)
      - andai 28d ago
        Yeah and it bills extra usage? Or did they walk that back too.. gotta keep the customers on their toes!
        agentdev001 28d ago
        Shoot, yes. The user experience of logging in is the same, but yes- using a different (non-cc) harness bumps you up to the pay-per-token rates. However! I have seen projects which use CC under the hood, in order to get the subsidized rates. Writing comments which get me to go look through anthropic documentation, and find friction I wasnt aware of (CC does not have an app-server), refreshes my frustration towards anthropic.
  - agentdev001 28d ago
    > less rambling and tangential This is not necessarily a problem with the harness (IE, swapping from Claude Code wouldn't necessarily fix this). If what you're looking to avoid is specifically 'rambling and tangential', you can get quite far with anything that adds directives to avoid those things, early in every context window. Ie, through use of Agents.md/claude.md, skills, hooks, and so on. Changing model would also affect this. Fable 5, Opus 5, and Sonnet 5 are all going to average out to different levels of ramble. Openai, Xai, Google, etc; different providers models will also have different levels of ramble. What Claude Code does take away from you is some level of control over what makes it into the context window. The system prompt which claude code append to the beginning of every session of course has measurable ramble-affect. I quite like the Pi harness, most in part because important goal with the approach behind it is "give the user as much control over what makes it into the cotext window as possible." Codex TUI is also good. Haven't touched it since moving to Pi however. Again- harness isnt the big "stop rambling" thing to change, tho.
    - epistasis 27d ago
      Yeah, exactly, the thinking process of the latest Claude models have really mucked up the responses they show to users, presumably to game benchmarks or something. My agents are constantly referring to things that happened behind the scenes, either in thinking or with subagents, as if I had full visibility into every aspect of everything they saw. But with Claude Code, everything is hidden. I've taken to looking through the jsonl of sessions rather than trying to get Claude Code to explain what it means, and have better success about 50% of the time. Older models work better, IMHO, and one can configure Claude Code to use any model that supports Anthropic Messages format, or a translator to other models, but the TUI itself is something I'm also straining against, and prefer Pi usually. Anthropic's moat is actually workplace environments that are serving the opposing goals of 1) executive demands to use AI, and 2) legal demands to keep all company data on lockdown. In that environment, employees can get locked into whatever the approved AI methods are, and Anthropic excels in navigating that.
  - cleaning 28d ago
    T3 Code if you want to use your subscriptions in an interface that respects its users.
  - epistasis 28d ago
    Pi with Claude is better than Claude code in my experience. But I even use old GLM5.2 with pi and generally have a better experience than current Claude Code. It reminds me of peak productivity with Claude Code of 5+ months ago.
  - speq 27d ago
    I resist the Node.js rage by using the Rust agent https://maki.sh/ https://maki.sh/ . It is very capable and has a sane plugin system via Lua.
- conradfr 28d ago
  I use it in a very basic way on the $20 plan and the code it produces seems alright (for the parts I care about) but I increasingly can't stand the way it "talks". I may actually change to something else entirely for this reason.
surgical_fire 28d ago
Ironically, I think Claude Code is shit, especially after I started to get used to Pi. It has a sort of first mover advantage, but I wouldn't be surprised if basically any harness is superior to that crap.

epistasis 28d ago

Claude Code is quickly becoming an anchor. Every week I marvel at how much worse it gets, how much more essential information is hidden and replaced with bloated useless TUI and rambling tangential responses that hide the useful bits of info behind jargon invented by the agent without ever explaining it to the user. It's like the PMs for Claude Code are reward hacking their own reinforcement learning.

annzabelle 28d ago
What tools do you find are better? I have been happy with Claude Code lately, but I haven't explored other options much in over a year. Curious to try something else out if it's less rambling and tangential.
- dalenw 28d ago
  Not OP but I like OpenCode a lot. But OhMyPi: https://omp.sh/ https://omp.sh/ is also taking off. Personally I didn't like it as much as OpenCode.
  - pixlmint 28d ago
    yeh i tried pi, as a neovim user i naturally like customizability, but with how little i use agents, i want something that just works, which opencode does for me.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 28d ago
  New guidelines that I have seen in a certain place is to configure and update existing CC setups to be CC/Codex agnostic. Plus setting up both allows Claude Code to delegate tasks [1] to Codex to reduce usage. Most are easy to share with symlinks and @agents. https://github.com/openai/codex-plugin-cc https://github.com/openai/codex-plugin-cc
  - andai 28d ago
    Oh my god, that's an official plugin. That's hilarious. I had the same idea last year, when I noticed how much cheaper GPT was for the same tasks, but Claude was still better as a high level "operator". Also cause OpenAI was cool with you calling their sub in an automated way, but Anthropic very much was not (they were banning people at the time).
- andai 28d ago
  The sub only works in Claude Code itself (unless they changed that rule again?), and all the Chinese models are trained on Claude Code (a bunch of them don't even work in Codex). I use a custom harness, but I constantly hear good things about Pi. EDIT: Checked out Pi and Oh-My-Pi. 250k LoC and 1.5M LoC respectively. Sheesh. How's that for minimalism... Mine's 50. (Lines.) https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/bd50aaa4bdb15f9a4cc8176ee387b212 https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/bd50aaa4bdb15f9a4cc8176ee3... Vendored in my own LLM micro library (100 LoC) so it's 150.[0] There's no parallelism or anything, but I use it for surgical edits and it's much faster and cheaper than the official harnesses for some reason. (Absence of sysprompt bigger than my repo probably helps there...) [0] This one uses OpenRouter so you can use it with any model, but jerry rigged Codex sub version available on demand :) --- I also have a ultra turbo bloated version (500 lines... need to strip it down a bit!) which has autorun files (for grep-based context injection), notification (frog croak when agent done, etc.) Watch this space!
  - agentdev001 28d ago
    They did walk that back, you are able to use an Anthropic login in a non-anthropic harness. (For now.) (Edit: I failed too mention, using a different harness with a CC/Anthropic subscription bumps you up to the pay-per-token rate.)
    - andai 28d ago
      Yeah and it bills extra usage? Or did they walk that back too.. gotta keep the customers on their toes!
      - agentdev001 28d ago
        Shoot, yes. The user experience of logging in is the same, but yes- using a different (non-cc) harness bumps you up to the pay-per-token rates. However! I have seen projects which use CC under the hood, in order to get the subsidized rates. Writing comments which get me to go look through anthropic documentation, and find friction I wasnt aware of (CC does not have an app-server), refreshes my frustration towards anthropic.
- agentdev001 28d ago
  > less rambling and tangential This is not necessarily a problem with the harness (IE, swapping from Claude Code wouldn't necessarily fix this). If what you're looking to avoid is specifically 'rambling and tangential', you can get quite far with anything that adds directives to avoid those things, early in every context window. Ie, through use of Agents.md/claude.md, skills, hooks, and so on. Changing model would also affect this. Fable 5, Opus 5, and Sonnet 5 are all going to average out to different levels of ramble. Openai, Xai, Google, etc; different providers models will also have different levels of ramble. What Claude Code does take away from you is some level of control over what makes it into the context window. The system prompt which claude code append to the beginning of every session of course has measurable ramble-affect. I quite like the Pi harness, most in part because important goal with the approach behind it is "give the user as much control over what makes it into the cotext window as possible." Codex TUI is also good. Haven't touched it since moving to Pi however. Again- harness isnt the big "stop rambling" thing to change, tho.
  - epistasis 27d ago
    Yeah, exactly, the thinking process of the latest Claude models have really mucked up the responses they show to users, presumably to game benchmarks or something. My agents are constantly referring to things that happened behind the scenes, either in thinking or with subagents, as if I had full visibility into every aspect of everything they saw. But with Claude Code, everything is hidden. I've taken to looking through the jsonl of sessions rather than trying to get Claude Code to explain what it means, and have better success about 50% of the time. Older models work better, IMHO, and one can configure Claude Code to use any model that supports Anthropic Messages format, or a translator to other models, but the TUI itself is something I'm also straining against, and prefer Pi usually. Anthropic's moat is actually workplace environments that are serving the opposing goals of 1) executive demands to use AI, and 2) legal demands to keep all company data on lockdown. In that environment, employees can get locked into whatever the approved AI methods are, and Anthropic excels in navigating that.
- cleaning 28d ago
  T3 Code if you want to use your subscriptions in an interface that respects its users.
- epistasis 28d ago
  Pi with Claude is better than Claude code in my experience. But I even use old GLM5.2 with pi and generally have a better experience than current Claude Code. It reminds me of peak productivity with Claude Code of 5+ months ago.
- speq 27d ago
  I resist the Node.js rage by using the Rust agent https://maki.sh/ https://maki.sh/ . It is very capable and has a sane plugin system via Lua.
conradfr 28d ago
I use it in a very basic way on the $20 plan and the code it produces seems alright (for the parts I care about) but I increasingly can't stand the way it "talks". I may actually change to something else entirely for this reason.

surgical_fire 28d ago

Ironically, I think Claude Code is shit, especially after I started to get used to Pi. It has a sort of first mover advantage, but I wouldn't be surprised if basically any harness is superior to that crap.