Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

Since this project hasn't had much attention, I replaced the submitted title ("Zot now supports Claude Opus 4.8") with that of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931161. I hope that's ok!

(I also merged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941645 from that thread into this one)

Coding agent harnesses strike me as similar to blog generators. They can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. Plugins help with adoption. And if you want it’s real easy to write your own that does exactly what you want.

Zot seems interesting, this is the first time I see it. On a quickl look it seems like Pi, but in Go. I was hoping to embed Pi into some of our internal projects and the typescript stuff was blocking me, I'll definitely give Zot a look.

> Subscription-capable - Anthropic Claude Pro/Max (anthropic), OpenAI Codex / ChatGPT Plus/Pro (openai-codex), Kimi Code (kimi), and GitHub Copilot (github-copilot).

Am i reading this right? Seems to suggest that this can be used with Claude Code Subscription, which isn't true i think. Did this pre-date the CC Subscription change? Or is it playing fast and loose with the rules hah.

Maybe it's using `-p`, which technically works for another few days i think lol. (That's going away.. what, June 1st? Something like that?)

I'm all for people writing their own coding agent harnesses... is there anything different about this one? Its not clear why I'd choose this over pi, opencode, or other existing options

There is a docker registry under the same name. https://zotregistry.dev

Anyone here using Zot and can share their experience?

Thought Claude models can only be used through Claude Code. I was wrong, I guess.

Nice to see one that isn't trying to grow into an agent business or cloud service.

Is there a good benchmark leaderboard between coding agents?

this is fucking awesome

it is fast, there is no fucking gateway fuckaround or any other similar issues, up and going in seconds

straight away I added two skills, that it wrote for itself, read my gmails and attachments, and browse the web, text browser first up, render page and screenshot with OCR for javascript heavy pages\

then I asked it, find the best value ram in my area, second hand as well as new, try gumtree and facebook marketplace, plus anything else relevant, bam - 15 seconds maybe a concise summarised range of options

then on another project, I told it to /study and then used the gmail plugin to access all the relevant gmails and attachments (which included minutes of all the meetings) and it was fully up to date with the project I am working on and ready to go

best agent I have used so far by a country mile, if you don't try it then that is your loss

did I mention it was fast, like 3x to 5x better productivity fast compared to openclaw, at least

one thing it does not do is support the up arrow/down arrow to scroll thru past commands, but you can just tell it, "run that websearch for ram again" etc, i will totally live witht his for all the other positives

Focus on cache hits

thank you for the honest description

Glad to see tooling in my native language. I don’t want to touch TypeScript stuff with a ten foot pole, but sadly it seems to be the lingua franca for agentic tools.

The one thing that would keep me from making the jump is CC’s auto mode.

I'm getting a little fatigued by all the harnesses that are made by other coding agents. Like, when I checked out opencode, it looked and felt incredibly impressive, until I looked at how frequently it completely invalidated the KV-cache. After looking at the source code, it's basically unsalvageable and I ran far far away. (It's mostly imperative garbage which is typical of undisciplined agent output. It doesn't even use React, it uses some other reactive library in a non-declarative way, I think SolidJS)

DeepSeek Reasonix is better in terms of cache stability because that is a core tenet, which should honestly be table stakes for agentic tooling, but the TUI is kind of ugly and the tools also kind of suck (they pretend the sandboxed working directory is at /, which makes the model almost unable to use MCP servers that expect to be passed filesystem paths). On top of that, it doesn't expose the structuredContent of MCP server tool responses, which is like... the entire point of it? Now all my tools that return huge swaths of JSON data into structuredContent, which Claude Code can process perfectly fine, need an additional separate path to generate readable versions of it into content because Reasonix ignores structuredContent for some reason. That's supposed to be the model-side output, while content is the user-side output, but whatever.

I don't know how much more of this I can take. I'm in the process of working on my own harness essentially from scratch, manually, because I'm so fed up with all this vibecoded tooling that misses incredibly basic and obvious design.

I feel like Claude Code used to be from scratch like this and that was why it was so good, until they started vibecoding large swaths of it and stripping away all the power-user features and good taste that made it so wonderful before. Now it even has random, inexplicable problems like "API Error: 400 messages.1.content.15: `thinking` or `redacted_thinking` blocks in the latest assistant message cannot be modified. These blocks must remain as they were in the original response." which shouldn't even be able to happen!!

And like, I get the distillation angle of why thinking output was completely removed from Claude, but I work in bypass-permissions mode and I want to correct misunderstandings as I see them. This is different than wanting to review each edit.

Speaking of reviewing each edit, I hate that Reasonix doesn't print diffs, and just says "use git diff". Like, no? I want to see each change the agent made and when. I don't want to only see one diff at the end; that nearly ruins the point of conversation history.

[flagged]