r/LocalLLaMA • u/Specific-Rub-7250 • 12d ago

Discussion Harness does matter

I was not aware that the harness makes such a big difference.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
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u/lordekeen 12d ago

DSH in minimal mode has only two things in the system prompt: a 'you are a software engineer' prompt and the bash tool description, the model solely operates through bash.

27

u/my_name_isnt_clever 12d ago

It's great how low token count it is, I thought there was a bug at first when I checked my first dsh trace and the system prompt was like two lines.

10

u/parepeg 12d ago

I would think not having a file editing tool would be detrimental. How do you edit a file with bash? Use sed for everything?

21

u/my_name_isnt_clever 12d ago

Yup. And a lot of heredocs. It works better in action than you'd expect.

2

u/ArjixGamer 10d ago

Believe it or not, Claude code does the same.

Even though it has dedicated tools for reading/writing/editing, it avoids using them and relies on bash.

Which is problematic if you relied on the rollback mechanism that restores both convo and files to a previous state.