[margalabargala]

> I am still baffled by the fact that we have collectively agreed to use agentic harnesses by the same companies that are selling access to their APIs.

It's because the subscriptions force you to do so. The subscriptions are the most economical way to use e.g. Claude by close to an order of magnitude. If you max out a 20x plan every week, doing the same work with the API would cost you well into the four figures.

Anyone already using the Claude API pricing and using CC over OpenCode is kneecapping themselves.

[esperent]

I switched over to codex with pi last week. Even though I strongly dislike OpenAI and I hope this is a temporary solution, they're the only one of the frontier models that let me use my own harness and after recent CC shenanigans I'm done with proprietary harnesses.

The immediate thing I've noticed: I get way more out of the codex $100 plan than I was getting out of the Anthropic $200. Like, probably 2x at least.

The other think I've noticed: when using strict guardrails, TDD, reviews etc. I cannot notice any quality difference. Not only between Opus and Codex but even between the most recent models - GPT 5.3 code, GPT 5.4, and now GPT 5.5.

Well, 5.5 uses a huge amount of my session limits. 5.3 is very light, 5.4 somewhere in between. So now I use 5.4 for the main session/debugging/planning and then execute with 5.3.

Regarding usage, of course, it's hard to say how much is the model and how much is coming from Claude code and all this ridiculous malware scanning.

But it's nice to use a lightweight harness like pi and see that even with all my personal instructions, a good bunch of skills, custom tools etc., if I start a session and say "hi" I'm starting out with about 15k of context used. I think a closely equivalent setup in CC would start at 30-40k context.

[user34283]

I am using the Codex desktop app without the pi harness and my experience is quite different.

5.5 has been a noticeable improvement over 5.4, solving more complicated issues and faster too.

5.5 does not use a huge amount of my session limits with the $100 plan.

I use multiple conversations in parallel, all on xhigh effort with Fast on (2.5x consumption), and it’s still enough for me not to switch off Fast.

It also runs my tests, but I did not use TDD apart from sometimes telling it to cover an issue in a test before fixing it.

[gwerbin]

What's your Pi setup?

[esperent]

Probably not that different to everyone else's plan -> tdd -> review loops.

[_pdp_]

Correct. However, last time I checked enterprise customers are moving to metered billing. GitHub also decided to so. So it seems the subsidy is coming to an end? I don't know.