My experience is that it's not the models themselves that are limiting right now, it's the clunky alternative harnesses with weird missing features making for bad ergonomics around stuff like queue management, interruption, subagents, goals, etc.
My experience is that it's not the models themselves that are limiting right now, it's the clunky alternative harnesses with weird missing features making for bad ergonomics around stuff like queue management, interruption, subagents, goals, etc.
I agree completely.
It's also annoying that OpenCode doesn't even try to support local LLMs properly.
Getting OpenCode to work is possible, but extremely manual and clunky to configure. I have written a script to automate converting my llama-server configs into an OpenCode config, and that helps, but it's not ideal.
I have seriously considered writing Yet Another Coding Harness in my free time. I have some ideas for what would make it nice.
Pi is decent.
I've used the cli agents for claude, cursor, and pi, plus several custom harnesses I've written myself from time to time as experiments (and I guess technically gastown, if we're calling that a harness).
Pi is... just fine.
It does what I need it to, has a decent selection of tooling out of the box, integrates nicely with other tools, and generally gets out of my way enough that I don't think about it much anymore.
If you can run ~30b models at decent speeds, I think most folks would be pleasantly surprised at how capable they are with pi.
Tack on some of the extensions (ex https://pi.dev/packages/pi-mcp-adapter?name=mcp and https://pi.dev/packages/pi-web-access?name=search) and I get web tooling (ex - perplexity search), access to mcps to do things like drive chrome (https://browsermcp.io/) or firefox (https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-devtools-mcp)
It's fine. Is it as good as a subsidized top tier model? Nope. Is it free and still very capable? Yup.
And personally, I've been having a LOT of fun with the pi sdk (https://pi.dev/docs/latest/sdk)
Which is something that all the other providers charge you api access rates for (ex - thousands a month).
Heard good things about pi.dev but haven’t tried it. It might take care of some of those missing features you mentioned.
pi.dev is more like an agent developer kit. It's basically a substrate upon which you spend hours/days/weeks building your own agents or coding framework. It's pretty much the neovim to claude's vscode.
I mean - the base experience is just fine, with perfectly reasonable built in tools for file access and editing, plus bash.
But yes - it expands a lot if you're willing to play with it.
I'd actually say the vscode comparison is wrong, because vscode is very much "bring your own extension" in the same way that Pi is. While Claude is much more "visual studio" vibes. It's thick, it's opinionated, and it's absolutely not something you can really customize, but it can feel slick for supported workflows.