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Comment by chrisvalleybay | Hacker News Reader

Well, I'd love to use an open-source harness! My issue is that Opus 5.5 / Fable 5.1 has been the best model for me to work with, and it's way cheaper to use it with the subscription to Claude Code Max. I won't pay more just to use an open-source harness. I'd rather just wait it out and stay on Claude Code not having to constantly jump around / switch tools as the industry matures.

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You can use your claude subscription just fine in open harnesses!

I make one (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler) and it'll auto-detect and use your claude CLI. I use that claude plan for 90% of my work, plus a bit of GPT, I just prefer to do it inside a nicer, less locked-in environment than claude.

There's really no moat around proprietary closed harnesses, it's trivial to jump between them, but people need to be aware that it's possible!

it goes against anthropic‘s terms of service, and people have had their Claude accounts banned for doing exactly this.

The big hoo-har about it earlier this year was because something (opencode?) was pretending to be the claude CLI and using the API that way. Anthropic made a fuss, then GPT said "we don't mind people using their own harnesses" and everyone relaxed about it, as long as the harness goes via the claude CLI and doesn't try to cheat.

Yeah there's even an "Agent SDK" from Anthropic that manages Claude CLI sessions for you, and a separate token budget for apps that use it, on top of the subscription tokens.

even that was relaxed by Anthropic and they stopped chasing token prices for Agent SDK. I routinely use Agent SDK with my subscription and it doesn't come out of a separate budget. Their ToS vaguely says just don't use your personal subscription for commercial resale purposes.

Locked in? I routinely switch between claude and codex, same codebases, same skills, and even shared "memories" with maybe 5 minute effort to set it up. There is no lock in whatsoever.

Pi can utilize Claude or GPT subscriptions and they work wonderfully. You can have both subscriptions logged in and write your own tools to route to the model that works best in every scenario. I have access to both pro level subscriptions for work and a large credit count for api calls for Claude. I use all 3 with JEV as my router with a local model for context management and compaction. my token usage has gone down to a point where I rarely even use api calls. I would recommend oh-mi-pi for anyone who wants to get started with using an open source harness as it has very good memory and context management tools that ship with it and are extremely easy to set up.

"Claude Pro/Max Anthropic subscription auth is active for Claude Pro/Max accounts. Third-party harness usage draws from extra usage and is billed per token, not against Claude plan limits."

https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/v0.86.1/packages/c...

Is that not the case anymore?

You don't have to pay more - I wouldn't switch to an open source harness on a whim, but your harness/cheaper agents can always call Claude Code headlessly.

As context: I work as a consultant and produce code on behalf of my customers. What's most important to me is that the quality of the code is as high as it can be, without me having to rerun it with multiple different models to see which agents produces the best. If Opus 5.5/Fable 5.1 (or a different model for that sake) consistently produces the best code, I will use that for all my tasks, since that lowers the cognitive burden.

The cheaper agents never really matter, because the Max subscription costs me $100 and that is less than an hour of pay. In some cases the customer even pays for the subscription.

But I do love the idea of being able to use Pi or OpenCode. I am a heavy terminal user, and used Vim/Tmux/Lazygit-types of workflows before coding agents were in the terminal, so I do love customizability and portability. Right now there is just too much ground-shift to take part in it. Better to wait it out.

But but you can get incremental benefit, possibly even higher than the switching cost!

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