| > The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated and they are effectively a commodity at this point, you can use any of them with any provider more or less interchangeably. Yes and no. I've used a few different harnesses with closed and open models and there is definitely something going on that makes some harnesses work better than others. Many of the differences are hard to pin down and some are things people don't care about. But I wouldn't say they are commodified just yet. 1. Memory use. I have colleagues complaining that Clause Code uses several GB of memory. Meanwhile I haven't heard about that regarding codex or goose, or even opencode for that matter. 2. Suitability for local models. When you use Anthropic models, you use Anthropic as a provider. They can have software between the model and your harness that will fix issues with the model. One notable thing that even the best open weights models struggle with is broken tool calls. There is a lot that a harness can do to fix broken tool calls when working with a straight up ollama running a raw GGUF file. 3. Ease of use with non mainstream models. OpenCode has GREAT coverage of models/providers. Goose, less so as it relies on people to set up their own anthropic or openai compatability settings. e.g. Zed doesn't let you use Z.ai (which, if you speak British English, sounds ironic because "zed ai" isn't directly supported by Zed the editor). 4. Worktree support. Opencode and probably all the TUI harnesses works in a local directory - so you need the terminal to be in the worktree. Zed, however, works centrally on your git repo and tracks the worktrees so you can bounce around your work in a single window. Of these, '2' is maybe the most important one but also the hardest to pin down as a feature. '3' is a one time cost. Of course '1' could be a blocker for someone using a macbook air or neo. |