3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2026score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters recommend it as a first-hand argument for building your own lean agent harness instead of relying on bloated, vendor-controlled ones.
Mario Zechner explains why he built pi, a minimal coding agent, out of frustration with existing agent harnesses. He also discusses how AI agents are straining open source projects and argues for slowing down.
“There is a really good video by the author of pi.dev” (HN, 2026)
1 strong recommendations · 2 recommendations · Talks · intermediate · news from the time
There is a really good video by the author of pi.dev (which I have used to build some of my own harnesses): [this video] The basis of the argument is that the labs are constantly pushing updates to their system prompts that are used in claude code or codex, which are exceptionally bloated and change the sand beneath your feet with every update. By rolling your own harness, as long as you keep up with the latest advances and changes in the ecosystem, you capture a lot of the 'control' that LLM-based development feels like it strips from you. Obvious disclaimer that I use pi.dev when I am aiming for consistency, not absolute quality. Custom harnesses on pi are what I ship, claude code is still my fallback if I need to make sure a PR is the highest absolute quality
Argues for custom harnesses over bloated lab-controlled system prompts.
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