upvote
> What provider do you use?

1. My own harness + Local (which usually means Qwen3.6-35B-A3B), I use this fairly often for research gathering on topics, info gathering on code bases, etc.

2. My own harness + DeepSeek v4 Flash served by DeepSeek, I added $20 quite some time ago and somehow still have $18.77 in there after I don't know how many prompts. I use this pretty often, slightly less than my local setup, it's great and what I'm planning on running locally (eventually).

3. My own harness + OpenRouter with whichever model I want to try out. I use this very rarely.

4. Pi + OpenAI Codex $20 subscription. I don't use this almost at all anymore, but I keep the Codex subscription for testing things out to see how GPT-5.5 will handle a problem the other setups have issues with.

> Why do you trust it with serving full quality?

The only thing I've noticed seems unbearably useless sometimes versus what I noticed before was GPT-5.5 which has had some of the weirdest degradations I've seen. It's not to Anthropic levels but it definitely had some service issues a few times where I was wondering if they had accidentally (or purposefully) lobotomized it.

Everything else has mostly just been the same, except DeepSeek I noticed had some speed issues a few days ago.

> What harness do you use? Why do you trust it not to have malware (most harnessed are TS apps)?

I pretty much only use my own, agents are trivial to make and it's definitely not hard to make one that's better than Claude Code or Codex for whatever you're doing.

reply
I want to say that I agree with you on the value of writing your own coding harness. I wrote something simple in Emacs Lisp and it makes me happy occasionally using it. I am trying to learn Rust and I am working on my own Rust core orchestration layer and I plan on both a Rust command line client and I already have a Python library wrapper for the Rust code that I have written so far. I write a lot of ‘little books’ and I am almost sure to write yet another one on my current hacking project.

Are my little hacks as effective as OpenCode or Claude Code? No way, but I am learning a lot and having fun.

reply
Do you write /maintain evals? This is something I want to get into more. Otherwise I feel really blind and feel compelled to just drop money on frontier.
reply
Next to my Claude Pro plan, I have subbed to OpenCode Go. I find the OpenCode UX much better than in Claude Code CLI. As for models, I started a few months ago with GLM 5.1 and it was solid and could archive near sonnet-level tasks. It weirdly sputtered out Chinese characters sometimes. Then I switched to Kimi K2.6, which is the Chinese model I used the most until now. It used way too many reasoning tokens (improved in k2.7). But executed Claude created plans reliably. Now I’m back with GLM 5.2 and it’s really solid (among other things it’s good at design) and I get good usage with the $10 plan. Still the Claude models have less hiccups but the Chinese models are getting really close.
reply
OpenCode Go looked intriguing and I spent time reading their docs and pricing but didn’t purchase services. Do you think they are running it at a loss to get market share? (Probably not.) I have been happy buying tokens directly from DeepSeek (I am retired and everything I do is open source code and writing open content books (the manuscript files are available along with the source code) so I have no privacy issues). I also use FireWorks.ai to try different models. Both API services are excellent, but I may try OpenCode Go for a month or two to support the devs of OpenCode.
reply
It's possible they are running at a loss at present. But in a recent podcast their founder said he believes inference is profitable, based on their experience serving models: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/opencode (search for "profitable")
reply
Z.ai legacy Pro coding plan which will last me until the end of the year + maki.sh as the agent.

OpenCode works fine, i just find it very resource intensive for no good reason.

reply
I use both the openai subscription and the opencode go subscription. I use the go subscription for my personal work and the openai subscription for my consulting work.

The differences between the models are minimal, but I usually stick with gpt-5.4-mini, gpt-5.4, mimo-pro-2.5, deepseek-v4-pro. These latter ones have way more usage than even using 5.4-mini so I tend to use them in personal projects for that reason.

My harness is https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi. I trust it...enough. It updates very frequently so as a safe guard I run it sandboxed with https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap so it can only access the project folder and some whitelisted config files

reply
Thanks. I was looking at open code go yesterday and I couldn't figure out if the base pricing is including usage or if that's just base pricing and then you have to pay for usage too. How does it work? It is very cheap.
reply
OpenCode Go is a smoking deal IMO. You basically get 6x multiplier on the $10 price since you get $60 worth of usage for $10. And the first month is only $5 so it's even better.

It goes pretty quick, but it's still a great deal. Highly recommended.

reply

    > What provider do you use.
OpenRouter with pinned DeepSeek provider or OpenCode Go

    > Why do you trust it with serving full quality?
Quality seems good so far.

    > What harness do you use? Why do you trust it not to have malware (most harnessed are TS apps).
I wrote my own. A minimal harness without dependencies is only 65 lines of Python.
reply
For work, I mostly use Codex and some Claude. For personal use, I’ve started using Chinese models directly through their respective providers, mostly for automation tasks and experiments so far, either via the API directly or through the Pi harness.

I do not trust any of them. Everything runs inside virtual machines, not just the sandboxes provided by the harnesses. I also do not run Claude or Codex directly on the host machine. Not just because of supply chain fears, but also because of how incredibly user hostile the VC funded companies are when it comes to installing random stuff on your machine.

reply
Pi is great, set it up with a system prompt to give the model more direction and think less, and it crushes anything I give it
reply
Synthetic.new and Claude Code using GLM-5.2. Great model, but the harness will error out if using subagents. The base plan only allows one concurrent request at a time. Also, GLM will burn through your weekly quota in a day if you're not precise with your scope.
reply
Local using Qwen3.6-27B; 2xRTX 5070Ti graphics cards; VS Code with Cline at the moment and Ollama back-end (will get to trying the others soon).
reply
GLM 5.2 coding plan- I'll post the agent as soon as I can! But opencode works and their own zcode is really good as well.
reply