What exactly are you pointing out? I read the link and the linked thread and it's not clear what position is being presented.
I don't see evidence that the harness -- rather than the approach to information indexing and agent tooling -- makes much of a difference.
You can make a case "this harness bakes X in" (or in the case of pi "this harness bakes nothing in; you choose your own adventure"), but at the end of the day, skills are just markdown files and CLIs and shell scripts can be used by any harness; they are portable. CC allows override of the system prompt[0] and I would guess most harnesses have similar facilities. I don't see how the harness is going to be the bigger impact versus the configured tooling (skills, scripts, plugins).
The extraordinary claim here is that if I configured pi and CC, Codex, etc. with the same system prompt, same tools, same skills, that pi would outperform CC, Codex. That's what it means to say the harness matters. That just doesn't seem right; rather its the configuration of tools, skills, and default prompt that matters.
My point is pi-coding-agent [1] is a very well designed and implemented open source project that we all can learn from as software engineers. His blog post about his decision making [2] is also very well written.
I should've given original links instead of noisy HN threads.
I don't see evidence that the harness -- rather than the approach to information indexing and agent tooling -- makes much of a difference.
You can make a case "this harness bakes X in" (or in the case of pi "this harness bakes nothing in; you choose your own adventure"), but at the end of the day, skills are just markdown files and CLIs and shell scripts can be used by any harness; they are portable. CC allows override of the system prompt[0] and I would guess most harnesses have similar facilities. I don't see how the harness is going to be the bigger impact versus the configured tooling (skills, scripts, plugins).
The extraordinary claim here is that if I configured pi and CC, Codex, etc. with the same system prompt, same tools, same skills, that pi would outperform CC, Codex. That's what it means to say the harness matters. That just doesn't seem right; rather its the configuration of tools, skills, and default prompt that matters.
[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/cli-reference#system-prompt-...