[wiradikusuma]

That's interesting. I thought Claude Code is not as good, therefore people want to use Claude model with other alternatives. This is the other way around.

Which begs the question, regardless of the model, which Claude Code alternative is better? (I keep saying "Claude Code alternative" because I don't know the term... LLM CLI?)

[flexagoon]

AFAIK the two most popular open source harnesses right now are OpenCode and Pi. They take a pretty different approach, OpenCode includes a lot of features while Pi is very minimal by design and focused on extensibility, to the point where many people are just asking Pi to write a plugin for itself whenever they want it to have a new feature. I personally like Pi's philosophy more and I think its developer justified the choices really well in his blog post:

https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to... (the pi-coding-agent section)

[rjh29]

Author blocks referrals from HN, weirdly dramatic, especially considering they have 1086 karma here. I wonder what we did to them.

[flexagoon]

Oh damn, I haven't noticed because my browser removes the referer header. But I think the image on the block page is a pretty good answer to why he did that.

[SturgeonsLaw]

What's the image trying to convey? Genuine question, I just come here to read nerd stuff and I'm not aware of any controversy

[flexagoon]

The image shows Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. He has lately been on a huge AI psychosis streak, bragging about things like "shipping 37000 lines of code every day" and "using Claude Code so much it burned out his USB-C power connectors". He's in a lobster suit because he's talking about OpenClaw, an AI agent assistant which those same AI psychosis types lean into too much by giving it full read-write access to all their life and then getting surprised when it accidentally deletes all of their emails.

Pi's developer is obviously not anti-AI, and he definitely doesn't hate OpenClaw, since it's based on Pi. But there's a growing number of people who take those things too far, and a lot of them are on HN. You can easily find them in the comments of any AI-related post here. I assume that's the type of people the image is portraying.

[SturgeonsLaw]

Thank you for the explanation!

[wrs]

The common term for a tool that wraps an LLM with a workflow is “harness”.

[jijji]

I've seen good results with opencode connected to glm 5.1 on ollama cloud... for $20 a month you get similar performance that you get with opus 4.7

[copperx]

I love oh-my-pi, but I'm not sure if it's "better". Maybe just as good.

[g023]

I use DeepSeek v4 flash with CoPilot and it works pretty good.