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The Harness Is the Thing

scott-fryxell.github.io

41–50 of 109 posts

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#41
am I the only one here who is perfectly fine with deepseek and qwen? generally I do all the planning in my head and a few sentences describing what I want is enough for deepseek to save me hours of work. Hell I get away with flash for most of it and use pro for some reviews.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#42
post #3

Reading this really makes me wish that I had a slightly better workflow. I'm really soley dependent of Fable to the point that I don't use other models, and I've already sort of hit a point where I'm running into usage limits every week. I am really living on borrowed time — when Anthropic finally collapses their 50% usage increase at the end of August, I'll definitely be forced to switch my workflow. When that happe…

Just plan extensively and let Sonnet do the exec.

And Opus5 aggressive audits.

Once it has exactly your coding conventions and access to other code to copy bespoke patterns, a strong idea for what to do, then you can let it do the work.

You do the wiring, it fills it in.

Coding was never the work.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#43
post #25
post #3

Reading this really makes me wish that I had a slightly better workflow. I'm really soley dependent of Fable to the point that I don't use other models, and I've already sort of hit a point where I'm running into usage limits every week. I am really living on borrowed time — when Anthropic finally collapses their 50% usage increase at the end of August, I'll definitely be forced to switch my workflow. When that happe…

Sol is basically at the same level, but with better usage. You're not dependent on Fable. You could switch the next minute and hardly experience quality differences.

My experience of Sol is that it's very instrumentally competent but is a complete terrorist that will cheerfully do unhinged things that "technically" solve a problem. For example, I asked it to verify something in our integration tests and it responded by grabbing kafka details out of config and trying to use them. When I pointed out that this was not it, it did the same thing with a database client instead. Conversely, I'm pretty sure Fable or even Opus would have done something consistent with what the rest of the codebase does (consume an API or point out that there's no API to access in this case).

I don't have Fable at work but I'd probably use it for actual code if I did because not having to spend time handholding the model on this stuff and getting useful code first try is very useful

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#44
post #4
post #3

Reading this really makes me wish that I had a slightly better workflow. I'm really soley dependent of Fable to the point that I don't use other models, and I've already sort of hit a point where I'm running into usage limits every week. I am really living on borrowed time — when Anthropic finally collapses their 50% usage increase at the end of August, I'll definitely be forced to switch my workflow. When that happe…

I've been using GPT-5.6 Luna for everything at this point. It is more than enough to do all the work I need to do. You have to lead it by the nose, but if you know where you're going it works really, really well.

I’ve just been using it, with a chat interface. Basically, as a “consultant.”

For me, and my projects, it’s been great. It’s made an enormous difference.

I guess my workflow may seem “quaint,” to many folks, here, but the end results speak for themselves.

I suspect that one vocation that could get heavily impacted by AI, is the consulting business. That’s where many experienced people go, as they reach their career peak.

In my last project (just about to ship), ChatGPT replaced a whole bunch of services that would usually be supplied by external advisors.

But these are also services that I would normally not be able to afford, otherwise, and would just have to “make do” with. This release will have a level of polish that I have would never been able to achieve, unassisted by AI (I had originally used “on my own,” there, but the reality is, it actually was “on my own”).

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#48
post #28

LoRA adaptive learning using open-weight models and your own reasoning traces is the thing. The big labs have a mammoth job ahead of them if they want to compete with running your own model - they will basically have to give every single user their own persistent virtual machine. When it's all said and done, I think their only really moat will be as inference/hardware providers. Stripe buying OpenRouter was a very sm…

Can you explain what you mean with "LoRA adaptive learning using open-weight models and your own reasoning traces"?

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#49
Author states, “Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams.”

When I, as a single person, can produce a project in one month that would have taken a team of four people three months to produce, why would I care about token cost? I’m now spending $500/month instead of $40,000 month to get the same thing 3x faster. $500 for a project instead of $120,000. (Assumes my cost, $40k is the other three people)

It’s a no-brainer —- use frontier all the time.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#50
post #48
post #28

LoRA adaptive learning using open-weight models and your own reasoning traces is the thing. The big labs have a mammoth job ahead of them if they want to compete with running your own model - they will basically have to give every single user their own persistent virtual machine. When it's all said and done, I think their only really moat will be as inference/hardware providers. Stripe buying OpenRouter was a very sm…

Can you explain what you mean with "LoRA adaptive learning using open-weight models and your own reasoning traces"?

Running an open model locally on your own machine, and having it augment-train itself using your own sessions as the training input.
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