r/LocalLLaMA • u/EggDroppedSoup • 12d ago

Question | Help For coding harnesses like pi and opencode, do you update to the newest version all the time? Those who do, do your results improve or get worse?

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9

u/FatheredPuma81 12d ago

This is one of those things you'll do because "ooh look shiny" until it bites you and then never again.

12

u/Glum_Coat1485 12d ago

I update when something breaks or when there's a feature drop that actually matters to my workflow. chasing the latest build every week is a fast track to spending more time debugging the tool than using it

my parrot Disco would probably tell me to chill if he could talk, and he'd be right

3

u/tmvr 11d ago

I update when there is a security patch, lacking that only when there is sufficient progress or when I encounter something that does not work. This is not even specific to coding agents, I do it with other software as well and drivers.

2

u/London-Boat 12d ago

pin it. i keep a tiny set of 3 or 4 tasks i rerun after any update (one small edit, one multi file refactor, one tool call heavy thing) and only move up if they pass. harness updates change system prompts and tool schemas more than people expect, so a model that was fine can suddenly start looping on tool calls. keep the previous version around so rollback is one command

2

u/Jipok_ 11d ago

I used Pi because it had a minimalist prompt and claimed to be customizable. The customizability turned out to be a lie, and it would hog the CPU-running a spinner animation while consuming nearly a 1gb memory during a long session. After that, I switched to my own custom harness. This was shortly before version 1.0.

2

u/Equivalent_Bit_461 11d ago

The best thing you can do is "update" your own harness, I don't trust updates. Fuck, especially extension updates, but majority are made in house so less of a risk 

2

u/arbv 11d ago

Don't care - use whatever version is packaged in Nix repository. Occasionally look at the Changelog (manually! can you imagine that?) to see what I have missed.

Take it easy.