philbo

Spoken like a person who's never had to queue in a shop with an automatic door and then the queue reaches too close to the door and then you're the unfortunate person who keeps on accidentally opening the door while standing at the back of the queue and then everyone else in the queue glares at you.

Completely agree with your first paragraph and a point I've made repeatedly here is that I want agents to work more like pair programming and less like code review. I want to delegate typing, not thinking.

But what I've noticed is that lots of people don't want that. They're happy to delegate both typing and thinking.

There are folks who still want to think for themselves of course, but model providers are incentivised to maximise token spend over all else, so the "official" harnesses are not aligned with their needs. My message to those folks is: _go and build your own harnesses_.

I built one, it wasn't a huge lift and it completely changed how I work with LLMs. One consequence is that I choose smaller, cheaper models now because latency is more important with shorter feedback loops. I don't want a super-intelligent model that disappears for ages and provides a final answer, my own brain thinks and guides the process instead.

I'm deliberately not linking to my harness here because that's not the point. Think about what modes of work you want from a coding harness, then build one that works exactly like that. Immense happiness and satisfaction is just a couple of weekends away.

> it requires a lot of compute

This is one reason

> and trying

and this is the other.

I have. I thought it was okay, but it wasn't really the radical departure from other coding harnesses that I was looking for. Perhaps I could have made it that with more customization, I'm not sure.

My own harness doesn't provide the agent with shell access, so everything has to go through focused tools with limited functionality. There's also a navigator mode where the agent has no writable tools at all, instead it monitors the project for changes you make in your regular editor and comments on them in real-time. That stuff seemed easier to implement from the ground up.

Glm-5.3-flash for me. I like faster models because I stay involved all the way through. I don't delegate full control to the agent because it's harder to understand the end result that way.