leather coding harness

random reflections on trying some coding harnesses in a post-Claude world.

this was written throughout the past couple of weeks, so writing styles shift.

the girl on the keyboard is GLM-5.3-Flash's anime girl self image. it told me to not take the cat away from the prompt: "holding_cat is non-negotiable", it said.

%at=2026-08-29T18:08:55.000Z

#author_luna #coding_harness #llm_coding

why #

thanks to a convoluted series of events and the utter inability of Anthropic to add gift stacking to an account, my money went to limbo and the Fin AI support agent can't refund the gift, only the entire subscription. I told myself "fuck it", lost access to Claude right after the refund, and decided to just experiment with other models and harnesses, I have spent too much time and effort with dealing with Claude Code's Wild Ride and I can finally get out of it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I tag the versions of the harnesses, it's possible they heavily changed their UI/UX by the time you read them. do not treat my words as gospel, they are just research so I can find what is my Taste in coding harnesses. they can do whatever they want.

pi #

version tested: around 0.84.2.

https://pi.dev/

pi's whole shtick is to be the MVP of coding harnesses. it just provides the minimum viable harness, and if you want anything more out of that you need to create an extension

the problem with extensions is that to prevent extensions from breaking with each other, an extension basically needs to become a giant harness monolith. use pi-landstrip for sandboxing? now you need to use its subagents. try to use someone else's subagents and they conflict! use some kind of auto mode? that overrides landstrip, so that conflicts too!

the best extensions for pi (in my opinion) are basically collections of skills or LLM providers not included in the giant list of providers in the system already. anything else has the ability to conflict if its anything that affects the main agent loop

in some ways, this is a good thing! it forces people into minimal amount of plugins as going past N means your harness is unstable

on the other side pi doesnt tell you what N is and what extensions are reputable in setups or not, you shall find that on your own, which for some people is also a good thing. however, for me it has been a long line of questions on what should i trust or not. which you could call this as a problem of open source in general, pi doesnt want to provide specific answers to that, because nobody really has answers for that yet and if I start talking about it, the scope of this article increases drastically.

i think in the general case of recommending someone pi, i would add "spend a couple of days vibecoding the extensions you want" instead of giving a select set of extensions. that is a time/money/token investment that pi won't add to the sales pitch.

omp #

tested 17.2.12

https://omp.sh/

if pi is minimalist, omp is maximalist. it has everything you might want or even not want in a harness

its plan mode works, its main agent mode works like pi. nothing bad to say about it in that specific front

but the plan mode UI is ass. it's a full screen panel which means i cant scroll up to read the plan, i can jump between chapters but that's useless if each chapter is bigger than the height of your current terminal window, to scroll i can either pageup/down which i dont like since i need to continuously read the beginning/end lines as anchors when i want to skip things instead of just actually using chapters as jump anchors or... press arrow keys to go one line at a time. just print the entire thing, no jump ui, let me scroll how i would expect my terminal to scroll (or be claude code and use a real thing that actually accepts the mouse scroll wheel)

just that part of the UI is so grating I simply decided to not use omp.

polytoken #

report made at around polytoken 0.6.11

https://polytoken.dev/

this is the alt-harness i've used the most at time of writing, it is currently not finished but it has a very strong vision for agentic engineering which i dig. but the issues with it are exactly on the opinions, which leads to the friction i see with the harness

notes:

maki #

tested around ~0.4.8

https://maki.sh/

I heard of maki through someone else that used it and while doing my explorations and it stuck with me from the minimal/dense UI (I am a sucker for dense UIs). it's also FOSS which meant putting my taste to the test.

notes:

harnesses I haven't reviewed #

well, what's next? #

I'm of the school of thought that if you have complaints about something and you have the ability to try to fix it or tell someone to fix it, then do so. after being involved with the alt-coding-harnesses I've been working on my own coding harness, forked from maki. it's nowhere near done yet. won't even link it here.