4 ms·

> 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'r

> 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.

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.