[crystal_revenge]

This comment is a great example of how large and strange the skills gap in AI is right now.

Curious why your first impulse is not simply to point your favorite agent at a few examples and start brainstorming/planning from there?

Multiple times I’ve built a purpose specific bespoke tool starting this way. In fact, it’s a great way to learn how specialized tools are built.

[godwinson__4-8]

The problem of the sota models clamping down on third party harnesses should be stated upfront. Getting a SOTA model in a custom harness requires API pricing or risking an account ban, correct?

This preliminary change in cost may not make it worth it for people depending on which is their "favorite agent". Especially as the default harnesses for said agents continue to improve...

[nl]

> Getting a SOTA model in a custom harness requires API pricing or risking an account ban, correct?

No, only Anthropic has that policy (and I think even that is relaxed for an unknown period if you use the Claude Agent SDK: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...).

OpenAI, Kimi, Qwen, GLM and Deepseek all allow it.

I'm not sure about Gemini.

[embedding-shape]

> The problem of the sota models clamping down on third party harnesses should be stated upfront. Getting a SOTA model in a custom harness requires API pricing or risking an account ban, correct?

The opposite, how easy it is nowadays should be clarified. Codex's app-server quite literally is built to be integrated with, authentication is a breeze and it's quite stable, compared to the TUIs that are around.

It's a real shame Codex is moving in the direction of hiding stuff on local disks from users, hopefully they're revert the decision of encrypting the agent>sub-agent prompts so we get back introspection again...

[wasfgwp]

Presumably people want to hear the opinions of other people and still believe that they might learn more from the their experience than by exclusively interacting with AI models?

The alternative of that first impulse should be what exactly? Telling AI to research Medium AI drivel articles (since nobody seems to be posting long/medium form content anywhere else these days) to figure out what’s the best approach to building an AI harness?

BTW just my personal observation but I generally find AI notoriously bad at building any AI applications compared to standard software (which is not surprising given the scarcity of high quality training data)

[taytus]

This was my first thought as well. I can read online review about a product but I rather ask my friends their experience with it. Same thing here.

[jascha_eng]

huh? because im curious what they used? Claude Code and codex take completely different approaches. The core loop of feeding generation and having a bash tool is entirely the same. If you want to start building your own thing I'm sure there is good setups out there to start from rather than going from zero.

Ofc I can just fork gemini-cli if I want my own version but like I don't think that's what OP meant by build your own thing and customize it.