New Harness Interface

Elegent designs make me happy.

Maybe it's just because I'm a Millenial, but elegant designs and implementations make me happy.

The runner interface had become to bloated an in general just a mess of one-off patches and work arounds (as is bound to happen when vibe coding anything). So I took a look and came up with a way to solve several problems at once.

Top level it was to just create a standard interface for new runners (before each one was being treated like the special princess it was.)

Now, there is a contract and expectations- oh you're a new runner? Where do your skills go? Where does your auth go? How do you hanlde MCPs and sub-agents. etc. Basically, these harnesses aren't that special. They all more or less do the same things, with a bit changed under the hood, or another special whiz-bang feature.

This worked out great- I was getting lost in the hell that is a million special cases, and by doing so I solved some other issues I didn't even realize were related.

tl;dr

At the end, lol. Another way you can see that I actually write the blogs myself.

The workspace owns a what will be materialized into the $HOME directory. The sessions own what will be materialized into the /workspace directory. This lets you have some config shared across session, some isolated per session. You can share across workspaces using the webui.

But, for instance, the codex runner doesn't need to know about pi-web-access. And the pi runner doesn't need to know what's in the codex config about guardrails. And while they both might use the same skill, each harness expects it in a slightly different place on disk.

So all of that is handled. Elegantly. And if you're wondering where Claude Code is, I have railed and soap boxed many many times about how Anthropic releases second (borderline third) rate models with good heuristics, and have damaged not only the AI industry, but the entire computer science industry with their hamful rhetoric about model safety that is clearly just them trying to hand cuff other providers that are pulling further and further away from them. I've also been in code bases where Claude has been given a free hand, and they're gross, I can smell its stink almost right away. Lots of subroutines with no point- excessive documentation that says almost nothing. Etc. I started this post saying elegant designs make me happy. Claude does the opposite so hard, that I now think it may be fucking with me specifically.