Developers discuss harness design tradeoffs and alternatives
1 Oct 31 10:39 AM · 12d ago · 1 article · 2 posts · 9 comments · 3 sources · development 1 of 1
Comments from developers surfaced differing views on harness architecture. Some praised Prospero's lean C++ approach and desktop-focused design; others questioned whether C++ was the right choice for UI-heavy agent tools; several mentioned building their own harnesses to meet specific needs.
“At its core a coding harness is essentially curl glued to popen(). This should not require gigabytes of RAM. So I built my own: Prospero.”
fovc · hn ↗fovc Prospero creator
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first by HN Best, 12d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people said 22 voices · best of 23 · verbatim
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Nice to see a gui coding agent. I use tui agents all the time but I am building a gui one. I use Claude Code, Codex, opencode and a couple other but I do not like the DX/UX.I often want click a part of the wall of text (from agent) and search for related text, open them up on the side or so. I want to open a linked file. I want to answer multiple…
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Nitpicks about CLI coding agents:Many times, while they are doing something, I’ll be typing a prompt, and then all of a sudden I get a question with Y/N options, and by accident, I’ll type Y/N as part of a word thus “answering the question”, many times either steering in the wrong direction or stopping the agentNeither Claude code nor Codex solve…
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Great to see what you're doing there, but speaking as a 30-year hardcore C++ veteran (to the extent of creating my own C++ GUI framework: https://juce.com)... When I was writing a code agent (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler), there's no way I'd have used C++ for an agent GUI!Agent UIs are all markdown, HTML, big scrolling lists, text flow…
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You're not alone - I also revolted against the TUI crowd and created my own GUI-centric harness juggler (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler). Might be up your street. If you're not too involved in your own project, maybe help out on mine :)Honestly, I just don't get the TUI obsession, other than the fact that people are multiplexing many remote…
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I'm similar but not really a programmer. I've been a linux sysadmin for a few decades but for whatever reason I prefer using Codex via the desktop app rather than the TUI. The desktop app on linux is fine for me. Note: i've not used it anywhere else but since linux was the last to get the desktop client i'm assuming it's at least as good on other…
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OK, I like this in concept a LOT. I especially like that it's efficient and headless with an attachable GUI.But I don't like how opinionated it is: "Therefore Prospero prime design principle: Never wait forever. Every operation has a deadline. This decision influences everything."I respect that opinion, but I don't share it, and therefore an…
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As a counterpoint to a lot of the comments on this now portraying this as dated and questioning the stack behind - this is has the guts of great enterprise level software. Once you’ve serious data being thrown at something built on JS and run into OOMs, that’s when good old C(rust in the future maybe) stack shows these up.Love to see such a strong…
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If you're looking for an agent implementation that is light on resources, but prefer to work in a terminal, consider also hax (https://usehax.dev/). Less than 2 MB fully static Linux binary, few MBs of RAM use in runtime. Works great with local models also (auto-detects config from running llama-server), besides the usual cloud providers.
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What a beautiful and space efficient UI. I love Dear ImGUI and the people that build interfaces with it.Reading through the whole post, this sounds like an thoughtfully and intentionally designed product. One with strong opinions and the developer’s real lessons behind it. In the current era of slopware- especially around AI tooling - this is…
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I recently switched from the OpenCode GUI to OpenChamber, which still uses the OpenCode backend. It's pretty great. One of the features is the ability to select a portion of an agent's response and add a comment to it. Comments are sent along with the next prompt. It's also much better at handling subagents. With a proper plan in place, it will…
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I'm tired of tech people forgetting to see if something else is using a name: http://www.prospero.org/Way to cause confusion.This is like starting a new country and calling it France.
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I see the argument but personally I find LLMs to be a perfect TUI application because of their functionality. Text in -> text out is precisely how the models work so the interface doesn't need to go much beyond that.
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I can heartily recommend switching to private local speech to text voice input with Handy.
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Hopefully the agent loop holds up because that's also very important, would be quite a relief moving off harnesses consuming GBs of RAM because they're sending JSON to model provider server
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Many make their own harness today anyway...I did mine as well and that takes 4% the resources of opencode and in a similar tui style.I think it's great and everyone should make their own.
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I have used Prospero for some work today, and I have to say I really like it! I have settled on a combination of Zed, Pi and Paseo so far, but I'm adding Prospero into the mix from now on.
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i believe a harness is a personalized thing. everyone should develop their own. doesn't take long to have a working prototype, after that you can extend it as you use it.
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A year ago I never felt my MacBook was short on resources, but these days I find myself thinking a lot about the performance of harnesses and agent tools.
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I think agy has a “questions pending “ pattern for waiting questions rather than popups. I don’t like it but sounds like they were solving your issue
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There are so many cool harnesses I could use if I didn't have an outrageously subsidized Claude subscription
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whay would you need more then PI offers? Read Write Patch and shell shoudl be enough, also for GUI
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There are so many Prosperos already. Why choose a name that is so heavily overloaded?
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