Does the harness apply when you sue Claude model in third party IDE? like Opencode, or third party adds their harness on top, not replacing it?

Claude models seem to work far better in Anthropic harnesses. I don't know if this is because they are trained in that context or because they offer different models through external APIs.

Depends what you mean by "apply." The harness-specific instructions (Claude Code's own system prompt quirks) only get sent if Claude Code is the program calling the API. OpenCode or any other third-party tool writes and sends its own system prompt instead, so those exact lines aren't there. Whatever behavior shows up across different harnesses anyway is more likely a trained default of the model itself, not something coming from a particular harness's prompt.