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The Harness Is the Thing

scott-fryxell.github.io

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#81
post #76

> Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams. Yet the simple blog website static page saying that looks very weird and broken on the desktop firefox. How large should be a development team to make proper margins in 2026?

This problem is easily solved. "Check that the blog looks the same in XYZ browsers".

I have LLMs align stuff for me all the time because I'm too lazy. It takes the screenshot, changes the code, code auto reloads and boom, done.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#82
post #76

> Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams. Yet the simple blog website static page saying that looks very weird and broken on the desktop firefox. How large should be a development team to make proper margins in 2026?

Looks fine on ff, and the same as other browsers. You sure the issue isn't in your end?

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#83
post #82
post #76

> Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams. Yet the simple blog website static page saying that looks very weird and broken on the desktop firefox. How large should be a development team to make proper margins in 2026?

Looks fine on ff, and the same as other browsers. You sure the issue isn't in your end?

Well, who knows, but in brave it looks alright, and ff for me has extremely narrow text with disproportionately huge images. I see a few upvotes so I assume at least some other users have the same.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#84
post #65

I don't understand why no one has tried to make a harness without full shell access yet. It would be so much safer.

That exist?

"permission": { "bash": "deny" }

Or something equivalent in any agentic editor of your choice.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#85
post #76

> Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams. Yet the simple blog website static page saying that looks very weird and broken on the desktop firefox. How large should be a development team to make proper margins in 2026?

This problem is easily solved. "Check that the blog looks the same in XYZ browsers". I have LLMs align stuff for me all the time because I'm too lazy. It takes the screenshot, changes the code, code auto reloads and boom, done.

Sure. However I have a strange feeling when I read all AI praises and how productive everyone is while seeing more and more broken things everywhere. Sometimes from the same very productive people. Otherwise we might have said that maybe broken stuff goes from AI-deniers.

If everyone is doing the job of hundreds, extremely productive and everything is so easily fixed, why everything feels so slow and broken, even so basic things? That's kind of the point. I'd expect nearly perfect websites everywhere, especially from "productivity" people who mastered the flow.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#86
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sonnet 5 is the worst model of 2026. Literally just turn effort slider down on Opus, it's smarter, faster and cheaper than whatever Sonnet is. Beyond that, I find this whole plan and build thing to be a pointless waste of tokens. If your planner made a detailed enough plan, then the cost of executing that plan is a just one turn more of cached tokens, and minimal time. Meanwhile: switching agents, reloading context a…

Completely disagree (except the Sonnet bit, yes, it's degrading).

"then the cost of executing that plan is a just one turn more of cached tokens, and minimal time."

This is just not true at all. There's a huge gap between 'figured out the hard stuff' and 'rock solid'.

Dependencies, integration, corner cases, docs, testing, unforeseen issues, a lot of back and forth auditing making sure things are really tight.

Audits get diminishing marginal returns, but you have to do them until they don't find anything, and that's usually a few cycles.

So aside from the fact there is 'a lot of labour' - part of the plan (maybe the most important part) is documenting most of the trip-up scenarios. If you ran an experiment or two in the background your agent will 'discover' a few key odd things, you back those into the plan.

I'm 100% certain that this pattern works because I (and others) use it very successfully.

Hint: save your main context by using sub-agents to do grunt work - even in impl phase - farm out anything directly implementable without a ton of background.

Also - make a skill so your Claude can call Codex and visa versa and maintain long-running sub agents of 'the other kind'.

An Opus with 1M context window executing on a 'plan' that a Codex 'sub-agent' is executing on - ad a different Opus sug-agent is auditing hard ... that 1M token window is dramatically extended to 'many millions of tokens'.

That can work within Anthropic/Codex Pro plans.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#87
post #76

> Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams. Yet the simple blog website static page saying that looks very weird and broken on the desktop firefox. How large should be a development team to make proper margins in 2026?

> weird and broken

Weird, yes. Broken, I don't think so. Seems to just be a matter of taste.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when Anthropic finally collapses their 50% usage increase at the end of August, I'll definitely be forced to switch my workflow I cancelled my Anthropic subscription until they fix how their models write and it's no longer unbearably annoying and obnoxious. The concise output format is a step in the right direction but I need a few months away from them. Kimi and GLM models on Max reasoning feel pretty close to Fab…

Yes both Opus and Fable’s comment style is truly unbearable. I like the code result but it’s so annoying seeing it reflect our conversation as code comments.

Just quit reading the code then duh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#89
The author's product (Realness) heavily promotes the fact that it works without the use of AI...

... but clearly AI was used in the development?

That seems deeply cynical.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#90
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems there are two distinct groups, one which is doing relatively well with Luna, Deepseek Flash and similar models while other seem to be satisfied only with the state of the art.

People who know what they want and know how to describe what they want with sufficient detail, and everyone else.
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