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Don't Make Me Use Your Harness

jrdsgl.com7 points4 comments
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A developer canceled a Claude subscription after discovering purchased tokens could not be used in their preferred harness or through an LLM proxy, and hacky workarounds risk violating terms of service and permanent bans. They maintain a provider-agnostic workflow, having tried Qwen, MiniMax, Xiaomi, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter and others, and run a proxy that switches models by toggling /model and autoroutes requests to the desired model+thinking+provider. Recent months’ frontier models have shifted from “pretty cool” to essential software-building tools, but no single model or provider has a monopoly. The only publicly available harness keeping pace is pi, which recently released pi-durable.

The core argument is against harness lock-in: if providers insist on trapping users in their ecosystems, they must make the harness materially better. Specific demands include doubling subscription credit when used through the harness, superior inference speed compared with external access, no silent downgrades of messages to lower-tier models, and the ability to try beta models without data retention. The developer plans to build a custom harness for daily development if providers don’t meet these conditions, though they still rely on pi in the terminal for critical work.

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