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Towards a harness that can do anything
111–120 of 121 posts
Re: Towards a harness that can do anything
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have used too many words. You could not have written that many words yourself, so you must be posting slop. In fact, let's just go ahead and remove your comment which is obviously diminishing the quality of our otherwise impeccable conversations on hn. Sorry, I don't make the rules (That being said, "the most powerful AI agent file-editing tool in the world" is a bit of a stretch.)
lol fair and I appreciate the feedback. I'm overhauling tbe home page to include a demo and will definitely revisit the tagline as well. (Even if I still do believe it's true!)
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Re: Towards a harness that can do anything
#113I kind of have a different idea of agents. I totally believe in a deterministic scaffold but I really think that an agent should be as deterministic as possible - the more code, the better. Think of a typical loop we may ask of Claude Code today (assume we are not using TDD): run some test suite with fail fast mode, diagnose if the failure is due to recent feature changes (pass reference to backend/frontend, github i…
I’m definitely on the deterministic code train as well. All of my success for long running tasks has been around wrapping the agentic harness (cc, codex-cli, etc.) in a deterministic workflow with deterministic gates. We need a name for this outer layer. In my mind that is the true harness because it constrains the agents failure mode. I think flow engineering has been proposed. Maybe it’s the agentic exoskeleton?
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Re: Towards a harness that can do anything
#114Truly enjoyed this article, but hate to admit one thing: I'm so burned by AI slop that once I noticed this seems to have been "assisted" by an LLM, I got irrationally angry because I felt tricked.
It hit me at the end, when I read this:
> The idea behind Ambiance is simple: the model's priors [...] Everything else here is just in service of that.
I've noticed "in service of" take off similar to "load-bearing" with LLMs, and the whole structure just pattern matched to Claude for me.
I went back and scanned it over again, and noticed several other tells:
* "Think of U/L [Unix / Linux] as a motivating analogy rather than a direct comparison." * "Priors" _and_ "a priori" used in the same article. * "A real kernel […]. The Ambiance Kernel […]. The Kernel […]." — LLMs love this pattern.
To be abundantly clear, *I'm not calling this AI SLOP*; it's obvious that a human put a lot of thought into this, gives a shit about the topic, and shared interesting ideas leading to a productive discussion. I really did like it.
There's just something empty or hollow about the LLM style; paraphrasing Joni Mitchell "there's something lost and some thing gained" [1] when using AI. Your writing, your code is more consistent, more structured, more planned out — generally better but in a way that loses the character behind human writing.
[1]: From "Both Sides Now", a great song about looking something from two perspectives: youthful innocence, and jaded cynicism. Listen to the original 1969 version first, and then the 2000 remake as you can tell she's singing from the respective perspectives. Deeply meaningful song!
Re: Towards a harness that can do anything
#115I think domain specific harnesses are already surpassing generic harnesses. I also think software development is its own domain. My harness is a Claude Code plugin with its own brainstorming, adr, and planning skills with associated review and interview skills. Behavioral testing related to acceptance criteria is built in. Everything in my harness is gated to prevent ratholes. I recently inflated a docker container t…
Is your plugin just skills or does it have custom agents?
My own experience is that Claude will use your skills but will ignore your agents or custom search tools.
Re: Towards a harness that can do anything
#116Truly enjoyed this article, but hate to admit one thing: I'm so burned by AI slop that once I noticed this seems to have been "assisted" by an LLM, I got irrationally angry because I felt tricked. It hit me at the end, when I read this: > The idea behind Ambiance is simple: the model's priors [...] Everything else here is just in service of that. I've noticed "in service of" take off similar to "load-bearing" with LL…
I experience this too, but the danger is is making assumptions based on "tells" which might just be how the user wrote the post. It's a situation now where if someone authentically writes something, but happens to rub up against some arbitrary "tell," they flip a bit in the reader and get their work rejected. For example, I used em dashes fairly regularly in my writing before AI started convincing everyone that the mere presence of an em dash is the AI tell, so I actually stopped using them, just to avoid this backlash.
Re: Towards a harness that can do anything
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can drive agents via ACP these days, which I think is the layer you would want for what you’re talking about. The API is basically what you see as a user of Claude Code or Pi or whatever. You can make new sessions, send messages to sessions, configure which MCPs get started, etc. I’ve been poking at something similar to what you’re talking about via that route. My client prompts the agent to do a thing, and then…
I think it all comes down to tight, context efficient, deterministic feedback loops. Pre commit hooks work well for this type of thing. Ideally I think a set of those hooks should run on every file edit, however I haven't gotten around to testing something like that yet.
YMMV but I wouldn’t personally reach for either. They’re both out of band so you have to deal with pulling input back into the context and what to do if one side won’t communicate right.
File edits are just tool calls under the hood. If you’re using a decent agent then you should be able to override or extend the filesystem tools. If you’re on ACP, file reads/writes get proxied to your ACP client and you can inject your hooks there.
It’s pretty trivial to implement, this is well within the bounds of things most agents implement (for open source agents anyways, no idea how to extend Claude Code or Codex these days).
Re: Towards a harness that can do anything
#118I kind of have a different idea of agents. I totally believe in a deterministic scaffold but I really think that an agent should be as deterministic as possible - the more code, the better. Think of a typical loop we may ask of Claude Code today (assume we are not using TDD): run some test suite with fail fast mode, diagnose if the failure is due to recent feature changes (pass reference to backend/frontend, github i…
You might like this: https://github.com/deepclause/deepclause-sdk.
It’s a DSL I’ve been working on to encode mixed deterministic/probabilisitic agent behavior.
Re: Towards a harness that can do anything
#119I think domain specific harnesses are already surpassing generic harnesses. I also think software development is its own domain. My harness is a Claude Code plugin with its own brainstorming, adr, and planning skills with associated review and interview skills. Behavioral testing related to acceptance criteria is built in. Everything in my harness is gated to prevent ratholes. I recently inflated a docker container t…
Is your plugin just skills or does it have custom agents? My own experience is that Claude will use your skills but will ignore your agents or custom search tools.
It adheres to the full scope of skills, agents, and my custom gates. I’d hate Claude without it.
Re: Towards a harness that can do anything
#120I spent 6 months frantically working fulltime on a harness, and when it was finished, I just stopped using it and went back to Codex CLI. I've also stopped using all the fancy features: subagents, planning mode. I've also stopped worrying about context, since I just let codex hit compaction. Somehow this doesn't seem to hurt much. Weird.
You adapted to how your tool works rather than try to shape it into what it isn't. So far all the nondeterministic (prompt based) workflows I have tried have been meh in an "I can't tell if it's any better but it sure is more complicated and less portable" way. Current tools. Opencode and whatever cli i can't avoid (like claude code for my first month which I don't thinking I'll renew) usually accessed using Paseo fo…
Yeah, good point. The simpler solution eventually wins. But I do think a GUI makes more sense though, that was the reason I went my own way, but I think you're right that keeping it barebones is the way.