Live data from Hacker News

DeepSeek Harness developer preview

deepseek.com

21–30 of 346 posts

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#21
post #11

Is there a reason why so many of these agent harness are written in node.js?

1. it's built for async 2. runs everywhere 3. interpreted, making it fast to iterate on 4. decent performance 5. most popular language, llms are decent at writing it

An additional benefit of interpreted, I think, is to make plugins easier to distribute and incorporate. With a compiled language you’d need message passing or something.

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#24

Is there a reason why so many of these agent harness are written in node.js?

Probably for the ease of coding extensions — which strikes me as outdated thinking: if it’s open source and you’re outsourcing the coding to LLMs, why not use a compiled, safe language?

There’s an interesting counter example for DeepSeek called CodeWhale, though:

https://github.com/Hmbown/CodeWhale

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#25

I'm curious what peolle are finding with first party vs 3red party harnesses for coding. Do the first party harnesses really have an advantage when paired with the maker's model?

I use OpenCode and I like knowing the direct token spend for doing tasks. A healthy repo can get a lot done with Luna + fresh context. Then I can spend $1-$2 a day when I'm doing development, and costwise honestly it beats a $200 / month plan.

I also just do a bit of hand-coding to guide the agent still.

I worry the $200 / month plans are loss-leaders encouraging you to maximize token usage to churn out slop, rather than thoughtfully use coding agents in a way that still engages your brain, and produces good software.

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#27
post #14

Is there a reason why so many of these agent harness are written in node.js?

I'm not sure why specifically Javascript instead of something like Python or other options, but using an interpreted environment minimizes the friction for implementing extension systems, which are an important feature in AI harnesses.

`uv` helps but it's new, and I don't think it has the same mindshare yet on "I just globally want to install this thing that needs an interpreter/runtime", so Python probably just doesn't come first to mind.

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#28
post #17

But like, what is it? Odd that this reached #1 on HN. The README is pretty bare outside of installation instructions and a link to "Cordis", which is "A Meta-Framework of Spatiotemporal Composability." and "under active development. The API is not yet stable and may change without notice.".

A "harness" is basically what you call Claude Code and such, i.e. a TUI to run the agent.

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#29
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. it's built for async 2. runs everywhere 3. interpreted, making it fast to iterate on 4. decent performance 5. most popular language, llms are decent at writing it

aren't 3 and 4 a tradeoff though? Yes you have 3 but "decent performance" cannot be an extaled value as compared to "runs everywhere". If its used as a counter balance to 3 then it shouldn't be its own unique point basically saying 4 is true despite 3 in this case.

when you're waiting for network or LLM inference the raw performance doesn't matter at all

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#30
post #17

But like, what is it? Odd that this reached #1 on HN. The README is pretty bare outside of installation instructions and a link to "Cordis", which is "A Meta-Framework of Spatiotemporal Composability." and "under active development. The API is not yet stable and may change without notice.".

A "harness" is basically what you call Claude Code and such, i.e. a TUI to run the agent.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN