alt Hacker NewsYou’re not wrong but I still think that the harness matters a lot when trying to accurately describe Claude Code.
Here’s a reframing:
If you asked people “what would you rather work with, today’s Claude Code harness with sonnet 3.7, or the 200 line agentic loop in the article with Opus 4.5, which would you choose?”
I suspect many people would choose 3.7 with the harness. Moreover, that is true, then I’d say the article is no longer useful for a modern understanding of Claude Code.
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Any person who would choose 3.7 with a fancy harness has a very poor memory about how dramatically the model capabilities have improved between then and now.
This is SO wrong.
I actually wrote my own simple agent (with some twists) in part so I could compare models.
Opus 4.5 is in a completely different league to Sonnet 4.5, and 3.7 isn't even on the same planet.
I happily use my agent with Opus but there is no world in which I'd use a Sonnet 3.7 level model for anything beyond simple code completion.
I don't think so, model improvements far outweigh any harness or tooling.
Look at https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent for proof