There's this great blog post by Joel Spolsky from 2000 [1], where he essentially argues that controlling your environment makes you happy. He writes about his summer job in a bakery and how the dough mixers would be so unpredictable and how frustrating that was. I think AI agents are quite similar to a lot of folks, they change significantly with each major model update and even every day as the vendor tweaks the system prompts and settings, so you never feel "in control", it's more like pushing buttons on some blackbox and hoping the right stuff happens inside. Most people are unhappy about that as it takes away the mastery and craft aspect of software development and makes them managers of unpredictable AI tools. I certainly get this feeling even though I like AI in general, but having days where everything goes so well working with the agent and then days where nothing really seems to work and not knowing why is quite frustrating.
1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/10/controlling-your-e...
> and even every day as the vendor tweaks the system prompts
I just patched Claude Code's system prompts, pinned the version and stopped upgrading without first dissecting and auditing the executable. Even discovered Anthropic can remotely inject strings into the system prompt via some "growth book" or something. Neutralized that too.
Things got a lot better after I started doing this. It straight up fixed Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.8 got more consistent in my subjective experience.
Sadly there's nothing I can do about Anthropic's server side "system reminders" whenever some prompt trips their classifiers or whatever.
I'm in the process of switching to OpenAI and Codex. The open source harness is a breath of fresh air. We'll see how that goes.
Maybe you should try using Pi [0] if you care a lot about owning your harness and making sure you're in control of what goes into your system prompt and context?
[0]: https://pi.dev
Crazy amount of effort when you can just use a different harness and a better and cheaper model.