I know it seems counter-intuitive but are there any agent harnesses that aren’t written with AI? All these half a million LoC codebases seem insane to me when I run my business on a full-stack web application that’s like 50k lines of code and my MvP was like 10k. These are just TUIs that call a model endpoint with some shell-out commands. These things have only been around in time measured in months, half a million LoC is crazy to me.
> These are just TUIs that call a model endpoint with some shell-out commands.
Claude Code CLI is actually horrible: it's a full headless browser rendering that's then converted in real-time to text to show in the terminal. And that fact leaks to the user: when the model outputs ASCII, the converter shall happily convert it to Unicode (no latter than yesterday there was a TFA complaining about Unicode characters breaking Unix pipes / parsers expecting ASCII commands).
It's ultra annoying during debugging sessions (that is not when in a full agentic loop where it YOLOs a solution): you can't easily cut/paste from the CLI because the output you get is not what the model did output.
Mega, mega, mega annoying.
What should be something simple becomes a rube-goldberg machinery that, of course, fucks up something fundamental: converting the model's characters to something else is just pathetically bad.
Anyone from Anthropic reading? Get your shit together: if you keep this "headless browser rendering converted to text", at least do not fucking modify the characters.*
Check out pi coding agent, https://pi.dev