My experience exactly! I’ve recently become so tired of the Claude harness that I switched to OpenCode (which is extremely good compared to Claude). However, OpenCode is also tedious to change, and it inherits all the “good stuff,” like treating agents as Markdown files and all the dancing around with hooks/plugins/skills scattered all over the place. Getting stuck again and again, I’ve ultimately come to the conclusion that this must be solved by writing my own damn coding agent, with extensibility that’s acceptable for real-world engineering.
Give Pi[1] a try. Comes pretty barebones out of the box, yet still provides a decent default experience. Extension points are all TypeScript if you want. There are a lot of examples[2] and some 3rd party extensions[3].
I'll point out that if you want permission prompts for certain behavior, you have to add that yourself. There's at least one example.
Edit: Just noticed the article's author is using a fork of Pi.
[1]: https://shittycodingagent.ai/
[2]: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...
[3]: https://github.com/nicobailon
Before you build you own, try pi. It is what you are looking for.
[0] https://shittycodingagent.ai/