DeepSeek Harness developer preview • Hacker News Board

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#151

Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

jackbravo wrote: post #137

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JVM apparently has the disadvantage that nobody under the age of 40 wants to touch it anymore. I admit I haven't worked in it in 20 years, but I do think it's a marvel of engineering and unfairly maligned. It used to be my career but I wanted to be closer to the metal. Having Oracle's tramp-stamp on it may have been the final kiss of death in terms of totally-superficial "coolness" factor.

and you could say the same if not better from C#. But those are now becoming niche languages and ecosystems. One for people around microsoft, azure, etc. The other around oracle solutions. There are still pretty interesting projects around it any of them, but they seem to be losing mindshare against other languages.

nah, C# is huge in game development and things adjacent to it. Lots of young people know it and love it for that reason.

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#152

Post by __alexs » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

vhantz wrote: post #143

There is such a clear lack of innovation drive in this field. Every lab just copies what the other does. One of the most baffling things to me is how the once-upon-a-time good developer instinct to make everything reusable, testable, and deterministic is just getting lost into a sea of markdown begging a language model to please act a certain way. For example this repository has a "skill" definition that consists in…

Yes this whole focus on customisation and plugins etc is really just laziness and the absence of innovation. I don't want an infinitely programmable IDE. I already have that it's called my computer.

I want something that actually has an opinion and gives me productive value without having to spend days reconfiguring it first.

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#153

Post by __alexs » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

invaliduser wrote: post #89

«It uses an architecture where everything is a plugin» Ok, that's enough for me. I have developped over the year a plugin fatigue. Every product relying on "community plugins" for their features implies it works fine the 6 first months, then it's a nightmare of incompatible, deprecated, incompatible plugins, with no consistency and no governance. I understand how attractive it can be to companies to think, hey, let's…

For me the problem is not that it has a plugin based architecture. It's that it ONLY has that. If there are no batteries included what's the point?

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#154

Post by dominotw » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

vhantz wrote: post #143

There is such a clear lack of innovation drive in this field. Every lab just copies what the other does. One of the most baffling things to me is how the once-upon-a-time good developer instinct to make everything reusable, testable, and deterministic is just getting lost into a sea of markdown begging a language model to please act a certain way. For example this repository has a "skill" definition that consists in…

I remember a popular hn thread few yrs ago where a dev replaced their whole deployment pipeline with a prompt.

it was widely ridculed at that point but now i am not so sure.

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#155

Post by go_elmo » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

vhantz wrote: post #143

There is such a clear lack of innovation drive in this field. Every lab just copies what the other does. One of the most baffling things to me is how the once-upon-a-time good developer instinct to make everything reusable, testable, and deterministic is just getting lost into a sea of markdown begging a language model to please act a certain way. For example this repository has a "skill" definition that consists in…

"just trust the llm bro, it will figure it out" - no brains used here, its staggering...

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#156

Post by fridder » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

vhantz wrote: post #143

There is such a clear lack of innovation drive in this field. Every lab just copies what the other does. One of the most baffling things to me is how the once-upon-a-time good developer instinct to make everything reusable, testable, and deterministic is just getting lost into a sea of markdown begging a language model to please act a certain way. For example this repository has a "skill" definition that consists in…

The part that really annoys me is the stark difference in cost between harness usage and api usage. I'd like to build my own harness and maybe I just will and focus on local model serving

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#157

Post by LeBit » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

game_the0ry wrote: post #23

syntaxing wrote: post #5

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

npm as a distribution tool works well and typescript has types. Any reason why it should not be written in nodejs?

I always thought nodejs was a weird choice for CLI tools.

For web stuff, sure.

But for CLI, it never made sense to me. Especially when Python and Go exist.

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#158

Post by manphone » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #154

vhantz wrote: post #143

There is such a clear lack of innovation drive in this field. Every lab just copies what the other does. One of the most baffling things to me is how the once-upon-a-time good developer instinct to make everything reusable, testable, and deterministic is just getting lost into a sea of markdown begging a language model to please act a certain way. For example this repository has a "skill" definition that consists in…

I remember a popular hn thread few yrs ago where a dev replaced their whole deployment pipeline with a prompt. it was widely ridculed at that point but now i am not so sure.

Well, that makes one of us. Replacing deterministic processes that work with lossy processes makes no sense. You’re literally reinventing the wheel every single time, what are you talking about?

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#159

Post by addozhang » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

I personally really like products with plugin systems: a stable, cohesive co with a rich, extensible ecosystem. You can create products that fiyour exact needs, and even if there's no plugin that meets your requirements, you can build it yourself. At least there's vibe coding.

Just like Obsidian, there's also hot loading.

Re: DeepSeek Harness developer preview

#160

Post by flakiness » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

tianyicui wrote: post #119

Hi I'm one of the authors of DeepSeek Harness. It's just an early developer preview version we're presenting in MIT license currently. Expect lots of rough edges and compatibility-breaking changes. Any feedback and suggestions are more than welcome!

Tell me more about the ideas behind Cordis the plugin system. The paper is a bit too mathy to consume and I think it deserves a more accessible post or something.