[aliljet]

I've found myself so deeply embedded in the Claude Max subscription that I'm worried about potentially makign a switch. How are people making sure they stay nimble enough not to get trarpped by one company's ecosystem over another? For what it's worth, Opus 4.7 has not been a step up and it's come with an enormously higher usage of the subscription Anthropic offers making the entire offering double worse.

[gck1]

Start building your own liteweight "harness" that does things you need. Ignore all functionality of clients like CC or Codex and just implement whatever you start missing in your harness.

You can replace pretty much everything - skills system, subagents, etc with just tmux and a simple cli tool that the official clients can call.

Oh and definitely disable any form of "memory" system.

Essentially, treat all tooling that wraps the models as dumb gateways to inference. Then provider switch is basically a one line config change.

[nunez]

lol this is literally the same advice us ancient devops nerds were telling others back when ci/cd was new

write scripts that work anywhere and have your ci/cd pipeline be a "dumb" executor of those scripts. unless you want to be stuck on jenkins forever.

what's old is new again!

[TacticalCoder]

> You can replace pretty much everything - skills system, subagents, etc with just tmux and a simple cli tool that the official clients can call.

I'm very interest by this. Can you go a bit more into details?

ATM for example I'm running Claude Code CLI in a VM on a server and I use SSH to access it. I don't depend on anything specific to Anthropic. But it's still a bit of a pain to "switch" to, say, Codex.

How would that simple CLI tool work? And would CC / Codex call it?

[RALaBarge]

Check out github.com/ralabarge/beigebox -- OSS AI Harness, started as a way to save all of my data but has agentic features, MCP server, point it at any endpoint (or use any front end with it as well, transparent middleware)

So far what I am finding is that you just get the basics working and then use the tool and inference to improve the tool.

[caspar]

Not the OP but here is a good example: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

Initially I read it because just it was interesting but it has ended up being the harness I have stuck with - pi is well designed, nicely extensible and supports many model provider APIs. Though sadly gemini and claude's subscriptions can't really be used with it anymore thanks to openclaw.

[gck1]

I wish I had lower standards towards sharing absolute AI slop, then I could just drop a link to my implementation. But since I don't, let me just describe it. I essentially had claude build the initial version in a single session which I've been extending as I noticed any gaps in my process.

First, you need an entrypoint that kicks things off. You never run `claude` or `codex`, you always start by running `mycli-entrypoint` that:

1. Creates tmux session 2. Creates pane 3. Spawns claude/codex/gemini - whichever your default configured backend is 4. Automatically delivers a prompt (essentially a 'system message') to that process via tmux paste telling it what `mycli` is, how to use it, what commands are available and how it should never use built-in tools that this cli provides as alternatives.

After that, you build commands in `mycli` that CC/Codex are prompted to call when appropriate.

For example, if you want a "subagent", you have a `mycli spawn` command that takes a role (just preconfigured markdown file living in the same project), backend (claude/codex/...) and a model. Then whenever CC wants to spawn a subagent, it will call that command instead, which will create a pane, spawn a process and return agent ID to CC. Agent ID is auto generated by your cli and tmux pane is renamed to that so you can easily match later.

Then you also need a way for these agents to talk to each other. So your cli also has a `send` command that takes agent ID and a message and delivers it to the appropriate pane using automatically tracked mapping of pane_id<>agent_id.

Claude and codex automatically store everything that happens in the process as jsonl files in their config dirs. Your cli should have adapters for each backend and parse them into common format.

At this point, your possibilities are pretty much endless. You can have a sidecar process per agent that say, detects when model is reaching context window limit (it's in jsonl) and automatically send a message to it asking it to wrap up and report to a supervisor agent that will spawn a replacement.

I also don't use "skills" because skills are a loaded term that each of the harnesses interprets and loads/uses differently. So I call them "crafts" which are again, just markdown files in my project with an ID and supporting command `read-craft <craft-id>`. List of the available "crafts" are delivered using the same initialization message that each agent gets. If I like any third party skill, I just copy it to my "crafts" dir manually.

My implementation is an absolute junk, just Python + markdown files, and I have never looked at the actual code, but it works and I can adapt it to my process very easily without being dependent on any third party tool.

[type4]

I have a directory of skills that I symlink to Codex/Claude/pi. I make scripts that correspond with them to do any heavy lifting, I avoid platform specific features like Claude's hooks. I also symlink/share a user AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md

MCPs aren't as smooth, but I just set them up in each environment.

[threecheese]

Anecdotally, I get the same wall time with my Max x5 (100$) and my ChatGPT Teams (30$) subscriptions.

[chis]

It's surprisingly simple to switch. I mean both products offer basically identical coding CLI experiences. Personally I've been paying for Claude max $100, and ChatGPT $20, and then just using ChatGPT to fill in the gaps. Specifically I like it for code review and when Claude is down.

[dannyw]

Try GPT-5.5 as your daily driver for a bit. It felt a lot smarter, reliable, and I was much more productive with it.

[zaptrem]

I bumped from $20 -> $100 today but the Codex CLI lacking code rewind and "you can change files but ask me every time" mode from Claude Code is quite annoying. Sometimes I want to code, not vibe code lol.

[hx8]

I use Open Code as my harness. It's open source, bring your own API Key or OAuth token or self-hosted model. I've jumped from Opus 4.6 to Opus 4.7 to GPT 5.5 in the last 7 days. No big deal, intelligence is just a commodity in 2026.

The actual harness is great, very hackable, very extendable.

[NoveltyEngine]

Does Anthropic not actively ban people using oauth tokens in non-claude-code harnesses?

[hx8]

Yeah, for direct to Claude you need an API key. You can use other subscriptions like GitHub Copilot that expose Claude, but that path has been blocked.

[zackify]

I use pi.dev.

I get openai team plan at work.

Claude enterprise too.

I have openrouter for myself.

I use minimax 2.7. Kimi 2.6. And gpt 5.5 and opus 4.7. I can toggle between them in an open source interface that's how I stay able to not be trapped.

Minimax is so cheap and for personal stuff it works fine. So I'm always toggling between the nre releases

[peheje]

what about just personal stuff in a syncing interface, what do you use for that?

[zackify]

What's a syncing interface?

[pdntspa]

As a rule I've been symlinking or referencing generic "agents" versions of claude workflow files instead of placing those files directly in claude's purview

AGENTS.md / skills / etc

[beering]

What is the switching cost besides launching a different program? Don’t you just need to type what you want into the box?

[cube2222]

Small tip, at least for now you can switch back to Opus 4.6, both in the ui and in Claude Code.

[rane]

This might be the opposite of staying nimble as my workflows are quite tied to Claude Code specifically, however I've been experimenting with using OpenAI models in CC and it works surprisingly well.

[babelfish]

I use Conductor which lets me flip trivially between OpenAI/Anthropic models

[dannyw]

It’s good to just keep trying different ones from time to time.

[dogline]

Except for history, I don’t find much that stops you from switching back and forth on the CLI. They both use tools, each has a different voice, but they both work. Have it summarize your existing history into a markdown file, and read it in with any engine.

The APIs are pretty interchangeable too. Just ask to convert from one to the other if you need to.

[karlosvomacka]

use copilot and have access to all models

[dheera]

Coding models are effectively free. They are capable of making money and supporting themselves given access to the right set of things. That is what I do

[basisword]

I switched a couple of weeks ago just to see how it went. Codex is no better or worse. They’re both noticeably better at different things. I burn through my tokens much much faster on Codex though. For what it’s worth I’m sticking with Codex for now. It seems to be significantly better at UI work although has some really frustrating bad habits (like loading your UI with annoying copywriting no sane person would ever do).