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azuanrbtoday at 5:22 PM1 replyview on HN

What tools are you using to run the comparison? Or are you just running the prompts and checking them with something like ccusage?

I’m asking because I’ve been looking for agent harness comparison tools too. I’m interested in more than just the inputs and outputs—I also want the system prompts, traces, and tool calls. It’s useful to understand why Codex, for example, uses more tokens while Pi doesn’t.

Fewer tokens aren’t necessarily better if the agent skipped important checks. On the other hand, using more tokens could just mean it’s overthinking the process. Either way, seeing the full execution trace for the same task is really valuable.


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toshtoday at 5:36 PM

I built an ad-hoc custom comparison framework to inspect system prompts, caching behaviour, tool call outputs, exact api requests and responses and so on

I agree fewer tokens is not necessarily better but a bit counter-intuitively often the harness using fewer tokens is not only done faster but has better results

(that said: of course check the results, look at the full traces, agree!)

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