Very neat. The demo on the page feels very intuitive to me! (if you're used to bash at least)

I've only done a little of the new opencode v2 "mini" but it too offers a nice preserve-scroll by default.

OpenCode is the best behaved TUI i've seen by far (they invented OpenTUI to make it so good, also in Zig), so it feels less crucial. But it's nice to have there!

The "small core" model is very popular all of a sudden. DeepSeek's new harness is famously like that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285244

OpenCode isn't quite as small, but there's very much been a deliberate attempt to drive much more into a plugin-based system. I enjoyed Dax talking about the new constitution of opencode, and the results of his agent comparing OpenCode & the new DeepSeek. https://bsky.app/profile/thdxr.com/post/3msy4gjttoc2f https://bsky.app/profile/thdxr.com/post/3msygiqyg6v2y

> an architectural change we made in opencode2 is nearly everything is an internal plugin / there's 68 of them that cover our built in agents, integrations, config loading, etc

i also think this is such a brilliant fun architectural twist too:

> OpenCode is the first time i could justify event sourcing in a real system / everything that happens is an event which gets projected into the sqlite db

https://bsky.app/profile/thdxr.com/post/3mt2qx3ktib2c

it's so fun seeing new malleable software cores emerge, try to figure out how to augment agency. agentic software striving itself to extend the agency it itself offers. it's been way too long since we've had ambitions to build general system, architectures that serve more than the user. this has held computing back for far too long. this is such an excellent interesting field, of such a more ambitious computing, opening up.

"- For end users, its CLI output style and form factor aims to be closer to a Unix shell than a heavy "IDE in the terminal" TUI."

I've actually been wondering lately why coding agent functionality isn't just... part of my shell already. Just another kind of interaction modality with an existing shell. Could probably even be an extension to fish or nu-shell even.

Please stop me from forking off on yet another project though.

Most of all what you have said is not really any clear differentiation against the rest of the 100s of other agents. Just minuscule or non-negligible implementation details and I'm afraid it is sadly yet another experimental slop project.

It is a branded "mee too" coding agent that we have seen hundreds of them already.

Harness = the software the agent runs on. This is plain old software. You can trust it as much as any software. Agent = the thing that runs on the harness. It cannot be trusted because it is driven by an LLM

I think "harness" is a thing, the code/binary, and "agent" is a process, an instantiated run of that code/binary with a given LLM/env, etc.

So its like, "GTA 6" as the disc vs. the specific game you're in the middle of being chased by cops, harness vs agent.

In practice they're intertwined and it becomes hard not to use the terms somewhat interchangeably, but "you ask the agent how the harness works" vs. the other way around, clearly.

"Harness" should describe the overall system. The user interactions are increasingly negligible (due to model routing, adaptive reasoning, etc). "Agents" are the tool lists/settings provided to the model, etc.

It's basically just a relatively simple to create piece of software that's important to get right (since you use it so much), can be made by many different design philosophies (maximal vs. minimal, customizability, etc.), and has very few good standards around it as of yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory

Hacker news generally follows trends, and this is the current trend.

The discussion around coding agents nowadays is steering towards harnesses (which is probably a better description of what this is). "Agent" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting and has become a bit of a catch-all term to describe a model + harness + tooling + prompt + some other things that I've probably not thought about. The harness is a part that's being explored more as many believe it's where we can get some better performance out of the models.

This one in particular is from Vercel who provide a service to use models, so they have a vested interest in providing a harness.

Because we're actively exploring the best way to remove any need to deal with code, and make it so that you don't need any real talent to make a computer do things for anyone.

We haven't quite hit on the right formula yet, but people are very excited by the possibility.

It's a brand new type of software. Nobody knows what the best way to do it is so a lot of people are trying stuff out, and a lot of people are interested in new ideas.

Because they're valueless and trivial to produce, but trends are gonna trend.

It's a delicate mix of providing good system prompts, tools, workflows for agents, extensibility etc. I've used several and have yet to find the one that fits exactly how I want to work.

Another cause of coding harness inflation is that every model provider release their own coding agent, optimised for their models.

> Why there are so many new coding agents, and why they're commonly upvoted on HackerNews? It seems like there's a new one in the top 10 every other day.

It is widely known that upvote rings happen on this site.

If it isn't still common practice 40 years from now (8/18/2066), I'll give the first person to challenge me and cite this comment $1 USD (or equivalent value in the One-World Order-issued omni-currency that we will probably be using by then).

Not long. We are transitioning to your LLM curling an arbitrary markdown file and doing whatever it says.

There will always be people that need to install software that isn't available via package manager (or whatever other blessed source your platform of choice uses). Any solution you come up with will have the same caveat emptor as "curl | sh".

How is it different from any other installation method?

"it can do everything Claude code can do" This is a tad bit hyperbolic.

Very clean, thank you for posting!

It's a Vercel project, so I assume this is intentional. The steps to get started are to log in with Vercel or add an AI Gateway key.

support incoming for subscriptions (Codex, Grok)