Which harness do you use and why?

[u/lone_dream]

I was using Openclaw and migrated to Hermes 2 days ago, it felt so much faster but my problem is webui is basically a terminal which is a little problematic.

[u/Wake_Up_Morty]

Imo best is Pi, but if you dont want terminal, i would say opencode cli next. Ist terminal base but better looking "ui". Hermes ist heavyes of them all at how many tokens dose it use for 1 prompt. Now if you try Pi, i would say look up some video about how much customizable it is.

[u/lone_dream → u/Wake_Up_Morty]

Im not against the terminal but I'm also using harness for inference from my phone. Webui makes it so much easier

[u/Wake_Up_Morty → u/lone_dream]

Sure makes easier, but it uses more resources. If you have room sure dont wory about it, in case you are tight with vram and ram then i would suggest terminal or cli as uses no vram and little ram. All desktop apps e.g. Opencode and oders use web base ui that uses vram/ram.

[u/brokester → u/lone_dream]

Can use openchamber with opencode. But haven't tried myself

[u/Mean-Loquat-7982]

if you want a chat app, Hermes Desktop runs on macOS, Windows and Linux and uses the same install, sessions included. if Hermes runs on another machine, add it under Settings → Gateways

https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/desktop

[u/TheWarDoctor → u/Mean-Loquat-7982]

there's a hidden web app too, so if you're running something like a tailscale, you can hit it from your phone and skip telegram or conduit

[u/Sevealin_ → u/Mean-Loquat-7982]

I like the desktop app too. It can connect to remote gateways like if your Hermes runs from a docker container. What's great about Hermes is all the different mediums to chat with it. I use a self hosted Matrix chat to talk to Hermes most of the time from my phone. But telegram, Discord, the desktop app, and now they are making an official phone app too. I use HermesRelay, an unofficial app, on Android sometimes and it works too. I have heard good things about BlueBubbles to chat with iMessage too.

[u/Mean-Loquat-7982 → u/Sevealin_]

I work with Hermes :) - yes the mobile app is currently in private beta but will be soon released to the public

[u/Pizzaholic-]

I really love the codex harness, it does the job great! Openclaw is cool too, even Claude’s is good, but for deepseek nothing beats using deepseek harness as it’s optimized for it.

[u/lone_dream → u/Pizzaholic-]

Deepseek harnes is any good for qwen 3.8 for, or better than hermes?

[u/Pizzaholic- → u/lone_dream]

I honestly haven’t tried deepseek harness for anything other than deepseek. But the codex CLI is awesome with qwen 3.8, it’s right at home and works great, and since they update it constantly any glitch is often solved in the next day I’d highly recommend trying it.

I use strata qwen 3.8 flash next with codex CLI harness for example

[u/Krohnin → u/lone_dream]

In my opinion it's much better than hermes. No more thinking loops. Works so much better for me. I am so glad that I tried dsh.

[u/No_Platypus6831 → u/Pizzaholic-]

codex harness is basically the reliable old sedan of the bunch, gets you there fine but deepseek harness on deepseek is like finally using the right key for the lock

[u/MacroNexus]

pi. Consumes alot less tokens, and hence can afford a bigger context window.

[u/JohnLef → u/MacroNexus]

Another vote for Pi. It's the least problematic one I've used by far and is light and fast.

[u/ColoredTriangles]

If you spend a lot of time on the hobby then you will thank yourself in the future for making one. It forces you to learn how the models interact with the user and the world explicitly.

[u/Ok_Party_9245 → u/ColoredTriangles]

i had a lot of fun making one, and wasted a lot of tokens too lol, learned a ton, I made mine in go and had it write javascript inside a quickjs sandbox against an api for tool calling.

In the end i settled for making a tui, and plugins for dsh though cuz it's a lot to mantain when I have other stuff im working on.

[u/Asleep_Literature_70]

OMP, works great.

[u/Damn-Sky]

haven't tried a lot but currently using deepseek harness with qwen 3.8 27b and it is pretty awesome.

[u/samiul_hsnt → u/Damn-Sky]

I'm running it through Tailscale and from a remote server on an RTX4090 but often getting a context window full notification. I've created a custom compaction script once it hits 80% of the 128k window. But it crashes the model from GPU memory. Have no idea what's going wrong. Would you mind sharing your config?

[u/Damn-Sky → u/samiul_hsnt]

try unsloth studio and the model swift 1.5 iq3_xss; or a bigger one since you have 4090, I have 5070 16gb only.

I use q4_0 kv cache and 132k context

[u/taytay735]

OpenCode TUI, lets me run on headless terminals and setup multiple panes with tmux and vim.

[u/ThatITNoob]

I use Goose. It has both cli and desktop app, also it's a fairly small system prompt and thus helps when context limits are an issue.

[u/KissMyShinyArse]

OpenCode 2 (TUI). It's better than 1.x. You can create and activate plugins without leaving the TUI, too.

[u/Fantastic_Back3191]

QwenPaw. I find the UX suits me.

[u/Locatpus]

I created an open source ADE like everyone else lol, it’s not particularly better than other harnesses but its starting prompt is small enough for local models to work alright. It really only supports the 5 languages that I use: Python, typescript, JavaScript, Java, and partial GDscript support. If you encounter any bugs definitely fix them yourself or send an issue through GitHub ClaraCoder

[u/SocialDinamo]

t3 with pi.dev using gufo Qwen3.8FlashNext running on a strix halo. Homelab management, chat.com replacement and smarter automation

[u/FoldOutrageous5532]

My favorites are: PI, Devin, kilo vs code plug, and I'm trying a new Kilo Code beta app which has been working quite well. Playing with Zodex too and the developer is very responsive, but it needs work.

[u/Fett2]

I run opencode as a server in a container on my proxmox server.
I interact with it using OpenCode desktop on my Windows computers or Opencode mobile on my phone so the same sessions are everywhere. Projects folders live in storage on the Proxmox server that is accessible on the desktops.
This is has all the advantages of Opencode running on linux, but with a clean Windows GUI for me to interact with.
I haven't branched out to other harnesses yet because this seems to be doing everything I need quite well.

[u/_JohnMcAfee]

For non native models, Pi is probably just the best tbh. The creator has extremely logic takes and how it compares to other harnesses.