I decided to write my own harness, and thought people would find that a pointless thing to do in 2026. I was amazed how easy it was to build a harness that can read, write, and modify files within a project directory. I now use this harness on a daily basis, and it hasn't grown much since that first iteration.
That made me wonder: How many of us are using a custom harness on a regular basis? What keeps you using your own harness?
I pretty much end up hating every harness I use. Some come really close to what I'm looking for but then completely miss the mark in other ways. At the moment, I'm stripping OpenCode down to its absolute bare minimum, removing pretty much all of the vendor-specific crap and everything else I don't plan on using. Once I'm convinced that's stable, I'll identify how all the "good parts" work and reimplement the core using Rust.
And yeah, I know Pi exists, which in many ways is what I'm looking for, except even that ended up being more of a bulky mess than what I was hoping. Chose the install with Homebrew option, and for some reason it took an ungodly amount of time to install a buttload of dependencies and then compile, only to completely stall out and fail. I mean... what the fuck. Glad it works for other people, but this is the exact type of total nonsense that I'm done with when it comes to modern software.
For Pete's sake... I just want something that reads my text, contacts an LLM, and runs commands on my system. Why does this have to feel like coordinating a manned mission to the Moon? This shouldn't require even hundreds of megabytes of a runtime. It takes a fraction of the time for me to compile the Perfect Dark PC Port, a full blown FPS game, than it does for me to install some of these harnesses.
It feels like the pace at which the industry is defining things may be faster than the actual pace of change sometimes.