Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

zot.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 88 posts

Re: Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

#31

Post by lejalv »

LoganDark wrote: post #17
lejalv wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing your experience with reasonix in detail. Have you tried pi? I don't think I am at your level, so I'd welcome some more advanced user's advice.

I have not tried pi! I heard of it, but I didn't look into it because Anthropic is cracking down on third-party harnesses by making them prohibitively expensive. I suppose though now that I have a DeepSeek API key due to Reasonix I can give it a shot. (even the pro model is so cheap!! I've been using it for days on multiple projects and have barely spent $1, and I think it can go much further with better prompting.)…

No, I just was curious to know how you found Pi; I've got so much from pi + DS4 pro that I think I am done feeling bad about Anthropic limits. The cost is ridiculous, but I wonder if there's even a lower floor with reasonix or DS4-specific pi config

Re: Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

#32

Post by patriceckhart »

JaggerJo wrote: post #25

[flagged]

zot is a coding agent harness. not a data vault, not a pacemaker, and not a life-support device in any medical sense.

Ive been coding for almost 20 years, and for the past few with Go. Nobody would believe that a project of this scale or even a much smaller one could be pulled off, halfway stable, over a couple of days. Not even with a blueprint or two in hand. Thats why it matters, and its totally fair, to point out when something is largely vibe-coded. "Vibe slopped" is meant more as a joke. The essential parts of the code I actually understand. Some of them I modified and overhauled myself.

zot is a learning project not production logic with peoples sensible data or lives depending on it. ;-)

Re: Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

#33

Post by hydra-f »

patriceckhart wrote: post #28
karakanb wrote: post #9

Zot seems interesting, this is the first time I see it. On a quickl look it seems like Pi, but in Go. I was hoping to embed Pi into some of our internal projects and the typescript stuff was blocking me, I'll definitely give Zot a look.

pi is awesome, quite possibly the best OSS tool out there. You should definitely give it a shot if it fits your stack. zot has become my daily driver. I didnt build zot to compete. I built it to really get a feel for how harnesses work, and I do it with Go simply because I love the language. More on that here: https://www.patriceckhart.com/blog/posts/2026-04-23/why-i-bu...

What makes pi so awesome? It feels as though the whole thing is held together with tape. Poor performance, poor UX. Security is an afterthought. Not that versatile (as of yet). You certainly are better off writing your own personal harness.

Re: Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

#35

Post by patriceckhart »

hydra-f wrote: post #33
patriceckhart wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pi is awesome, quite possibly the best OSS tool out there. You should definitely give it a shot if it fits your stack. zot has become my daily driver. I didnt build zot to compete. I built it to really get a feel for how harnesses work, and I do it with Go simply because I love the language. More on that here: https://www.patriceckhart.com/blog/posts/2026-04-23/why-i-bu...

What makes pi so awesome? It feels as though the whole thing is held together with tape. Poor performance, poor UX. Security is an afterthought. Not that versatile (as of yet). You certainly are better off writing your own personal harness.

pi is extensible at every turn. thats what makes it special. zot is more limited there.

Re: Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

#36

Post by lejalv »

currywurst wrote: post #22
LoganDark wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not tried pi! I heard of it, but I didn't look into it because Anthropic is cracking down on third-party harnesses by making them prohibitively expensive. I suppose though now that I have a DeepSeek API key due to Reasonix I can give it a shot. (even the pro model is so cheap!! I've been using it for days on multiple projects and have barely spent $1, and I think it can go much further with better prompting.)…

In 18min , Mario Zechner , the creator of pi will echo more or less your exact concerns as to why he developed it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjfbvDXpFls Enjoy !

Thanks, this is a high-signal talk!

Re: Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

#37

Post by hydra-f »

patriceckhart wrote: post #35
hydra-f wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes pi so awesome? It feels as though the whole thing is held together with tape. Poor performance, poor UX. Security is an afterthought. Not that versatile (as of yet). You certainly are better off writing your own personal harness.

pi is extensible at every turn. thats what makes it special. zot is more limited there.

Extensibility has a cost which affects all my earlier points. Pi is fine for testing things you might include in your harness, but that's where I would draw the line

Re: Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

#38

Post by sshine »

patriceckhart wrote: post #32
JaggerJo wrote: post #25

[flagged]

zot is a coding agent harness. not a data vault, not a pacemaker, and not a life-support device in any medical sense. Ive been coding for almost 20 years, and for the past few with Go. Nobody would believe that a project of this scale or even a much smaller one could be pulled off, halfway stable, over a couple of days. Not even with a blueprint or two in hand. Thats why it matters, and its totally fair, to point out…

I get the joke, and I appreciate it.

As someone with 20 years of professional coding experience who vibe-codes certain tools in my current stack, I really get it.

But I'd still remove it from the front page, it just reads like you admit it sucks. Which vibe-coding a dev tool doesn't have to.

Judging from the animation, you actually cared to test the TUI quite a lot. (I've been vibe-coding TUI components without making an actual harness.)

Re: Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

#39

Post by sshine »

exe34 wrote: post #20
cedws wrote: post #18

Glad to see tooling in my native language. I don’t want to touch TypeScript stuff with a ten foot pole, but sadly it seems to be the lingua franca for agentic tools. The one thing that would keep me from making the jump is CC’s auto mode.

What's wrong with typescript? I was thinking of getting into it.

TypeScript the language is fine. Almost great, even.

JavaScript the ecosystem is mostly a flaming garbage dump of worms.

You can take measures to lower the pain of being in a toxically incompetent package space devolving faster than you can type commands.

Re: Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

#40

Post by sshine »

LoganDark wrote: post #14

I'm getting a little fatigued by all the harnesses that are made by other coding agents. Like, when I checked out opencode, it looked and felt incredibly impressive, until I looked at how frequently it completely invalidated the KV-cache. After looking at the source code, it's basically unsalvageable and I ran far far away. (It's mostly imperative garbage which is typical of undisciplined agent output. It doesn't eve…

Thanks for your evaluation.

I've deliberately been post-poning harness building.

I think it's great as an obligatory learning experience.

But I'm hoping someone will come along and provide the "best of breed" harness:

  - OpenCode's TUI and client-server model,
  - Claude's prompt engine,
  - Pi's extensibility, and
  - the codebase stability of a craftsman (yet to be seen).
I haven't tried other harnesses than those three. It's time-consuming, and does not align with my primary goals.

I've been reimplementing a TUI library based on Ratatui, but drawing the UI components of OpenCode's OpenTUI and a bunch of Ratatui-adjacent components. Was hoping someone would separate the concerns and reverse engineer Claude's prompt engine and just not provide a UI for it. Make it modular so each part can be replaced by something better. There's only really 3 parts: TUI library, engine, and client-server (so you can choose between web or terminal, and so you can host the engine + server in the cloud, resume your sessions, and whatever enterprise features you want for session and memory management.

Post reply on HN