Here’s a result that surprised me: the reasoning model wrote more correct code than the plain one — and still lost. It nailed all 32 test cases, then sat there and refused to declare itself done. Burned the whole time budget re-checking work that was already right. “Correct, but won’t stop” turns out to be a real failure mode, and it’s exactly the wrong one for an autonomous agent loop.
A room full of CTOs and architects met in a Swiss village this summer and, without quite meaning to, gave a name to the thing I’ve been quietly building for months. They call it harness engineering. I’ve been calling it “the tooling is the new model.” Same animal. And the part they flagged as unsolved, I think I’ve got a first, opinionated stab at.
My experience is that Claude Code is great with Foundation Models, but way too heavy for local inference. I’ve been enjoying oh-my-pi (omp) but was surprised that hax (a simpler agent in written in C) was TWICE as fast and used HALF the tokens! It’s all about PREFILL1. Read on!