A fellow user replied below, but it refers to the software that uses the LLM (Claude Code, Opencode, pi.dev, etc.).
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Funny you mention that, because I started noticing the word 'harness' being used everywhere about a month ago, even though I hadn’t seen it before (in this context). As I don’t trust my memory, I assumed I had just been overlooking it and added it to my vocabulary. However, a Google Trends search does show increased usage since the end of March: https://trends.google.com.br/trends/explore?date=today%203-m...
Interesting timing, because I think it was in March when I had a chat with Gemini about what the heck these things are supposed to be called, and that's where I first heard the term.
It's probably just a coincidence. But that would be pretty interesting if we have an example of some kind of memetic phenomenon where one or more popular LLMs makes a claim that people then start to repeat as true, or at least follow up on it and start writing about it, and in so doing the claim becomes true. Even if it didn't happen in this case, I feel like it's only a matter of time.
Harness: opencode
Subscription: opencode go
I also use a claw agent[1] via Telegram, which uses pi.dev under the hood with my opencode go subscription.
[1] I forked one of those Claw projects (bareclaw) and made many changes to it.
When you say harness what do you mean? I see the term thrown around a lot and I think it's lost its meaning in some fashion.
In this context it means the tool you use the models with. So Claude Code is a harness, OpenAI's codex, Opencode, pi, etc. Those are all cli harnesses
Gotcha, thanks!
A fellow user replied below, but it refers to the software that uses the LLM (Claude Code, Opencode, pi.dev, etc.).
---
Funny you mention that, because I started noticing the word 'harness' being used everywhere about a month ago, even though I hadn’t seen it before (in this context). As I don’t trust my memory, I assumed I had just been overlooking it and added it to my vocabulary. However, a Google Trends search does show increased usage since the end of March: https://trends.google.com.br/trends/explore?date=today%203-m...
Interesting timing, because I think it was in March when I had a chat with Gemini about what the heck these things are supposed to be called, and that's where I first heard the term.
It's probably just a coincidence. But that would be pretty interesting if we have an example of some kind of memetic phenomenon where one or more popular LLMs makes a claim that people then start to repeat as true, or at least follow up on it and start writing about it, and in so doing the claim becomes true. Even if it didn't happen in this case, I feel like it's only a matter of time.
Not OP, but having explored the field a good bit, Openrouter + pi harness in a devcontainer work great as a sane starting point.
Highly recommend as a clean way to try out the upstart models.