I have so many use cases for this. I just hope that we'll get a standard like https://www.openresponses.org/, because the idea of coupling an app to a particular vendor doesn't seem appealing at all, especially since it seems that the functionalities they offer are more or less the same. (I'm thinking about the OpenAI's Agent API and Anthropic's Agent SDK as "alternatives.)
Its not bad, just most of them are created by corpos to sell slop to the masses. AI companies suck and you know it. Its not about good software, its about making as much money as possible before the hype train dies.
Gotta justify that $160k salary somehow I guess, and if the AI is writing all the code you used to write and your job is now to manage the AI, what better way to spend the days than making new AI tools and workflows and markdown files all day
why do we even care, this is a clear, lets move away from `people pushing software to git` to `agent is pushing software, agentic or not , to somehwere, db, git, or something else` human does involved in this unless there is a problem. JS or Python, is really not essential in this case, maybe it's WASM built from rust. it's not for human.
Cursor moving this direction, is a prep work where human no longer command that much , hence the usage will drop. e.g. their core product is vulnerable. Software factories, is the ultimate game over for our industry.
Honest question, why shouldn't any agent SDK's API simply be a PROMPT.md with a runtime that runs the LLM with tools; why do you need excessive abstractions over that like langchain offers?
This "runtime" is what you are building with LangChain.. A harness like claude code/codex etc is general purpose and its env is a shell + tools.
But with a custom runtime (basically a loop where we ask llm what to do next), we can give it specific tools which we define in code. This can help with things like authorization since, well its custom code you own.. so the runtime gets the tools scoped to the users permissions etc.
My 2c is that agents are not at the level where companies can easily just have unconstrained LLM with tools and let it be. Different parts of the workflow can have different models, different tools, different constraints, guardrails, etc.
The entrypoint still has to come from somewhere, and it's much more convenient to be able to explain the security and legal teams how data is handled, what is logged, how you can have control over a scenario where the agent does something unexpected.
Sure, for a personal project that could be enough, but we all know those companies target enterprise customers, and you would be surprised how little adoption there is when it comes to workflow automation due to the lack of controls.
I wish you would explain your reasoning instead of preemptively telling people they don't know what they're talking about. Then I might actually learn something.
Claude Code wont let me use their sub with one as far as I remember. So I'm stuck with their convoluted TUI. It does what I need, and when it doesn't I just build tools that Claude consumes. The new "Artifacts" feature has helped a bit though.
I was both excited and disappointed to learn that Claude Code has plugins, but they're not like actual plugins to let you customize CC, which would be nice.
Anthropic employees clarified in HN comment threads that the API credits are in addition to the existing behavior and not a replacement. Other harnesses can still call the Claude Code CLI and use the subscription quota that way.
There's just not really any features in an open-source harness that blow my mind enough to move off the highly-subsidized claude code subscription. I type in instructions and it spits out code. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the more complex features being floated are productivity theater.
Why would you not just build your own harness in October 2026? Gateway, memory, tool calls, LLM api - the basics are pretty simple to get started and get to a point where your harness can be self-improving to add any new features that you need.
1. A lot of people already have Claude Code set up, and it's easier to keep using that than to install something new.
2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.
3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.
4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.
5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.
[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?
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[ 1249 ms ] story [ 831 ms ] threadLiterally everyday there is a new tool and the tools released last week are deprecated.
Why is a large number of ideas, technologies, frameworks, etc. bad?
I think the difference is that those endless technologies will probably be used by other agents without people's explicit knowledge.
Cursor moving this direction, is a prep work where human no longer command that much , hence the usage will drop. e.g. their core product is vulnerable. Software factories, is the ultimate game over for our industry.
And a lot of the apps are the same thing.
It's going to be a race to the bottom.
Is it to have boundaries of some determinism?
This "runtime" is what you are building with LangChain.. A harness like claude code/codex etc is general purpose and its env is a shell + tools. But with a custom runtime (basically a loop where we ask llm what to do next), we can give it specific tools which we define in code. This can help with things like authorization since, well its custom code you own.. so the runtime gets the tools scoped to the users permissions etc.
The entrypoint still has to come from somewhere, and it's much more convenient to be able to explain the security and legal teams how data is handled, what is logged, how you can have control over a scenario where the agent does something unexpected.
Sure, for a personal project that could be enough, but we all know those companies target enterprise customers, and you would be surprised how little adoption there is when it comes to workflow automation due to the lack of controls.
Meanwhile, we know Grok Bot was really Cursor beforehand... it must be wild in there.
We build a desktop app on top of the SDK, so I've spent a lot of time on that page.
More and more harnesses are headed this way, there are two notable holdouts.
2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.
3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.
4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.
5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.
[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?
I thought this was pretty much well established that all of the labs have model - harness pairings for exactly this reason
Whale Paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00196
EMNLP talk from like 2 weeks ago https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2207/
Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Pi etc you're paying the full API price.
https://cursor.com/blog/typescript-sdk