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Strands Harness

50 points zuckerborg0101 1 hour ago 34 comments

tontinton 44 minutes ago | parent

Can you also compare in the charts https://maki.sh?

Should give you some competition.

fxwin 42 minutes ago | parent

why would you include oh-my-pi in the comparison but not vanilla pi?

chaos_emergent 35 minutes ago | parent

Am I wrong in saying that the interfaces presented to the model in OMP versus plain old Pi are identical?

c0rruptbytes 30 minutes ago | parent

OMP has a lot of candy that raises token cost compared to vanilla pi

whattheheckheck 42 minutes ago | parent

Pretty crazy amazon is advertising an open source repo. Not suggesting this is an ad but I've seen ads on reddit for it.

Ive heard from a 25 yoe consultant in a meetup group in person that aws agentcore was THE best way to handle enterprise agentic workflows with all of the proper knobs for governance etc since it comes with the iam integrations and arns etc.

theturtletalks 40 minutes ago | parent

Why is Pi not in the benchmarks? Deepseek beats Strands and its built on Pi so that’s all I needed to know.

techscruggs 29 minutes ago | parent

Deepseek was cheaper, but also less accurate. "Beats" isn't a fair assessment.

theturtletalks 9 minutes ago | parent

That’s fair, but Strands is advertising their harness needing way less tokens which does relate to cost.

In that same vein, Pi is less bloated then Deepseek and Oh My Pi, which are built on top of Pi. Isn’t it dubious to leave it out?

leodavi 8 minutes ago | parent

Deepseek harness is not actually built on Pi harness. It's an independent project.

jsw97 4 minutes ago | parent

Came here to say this. They have oh-my-pi in the benchmark but not pi, but those are very different animals. pi is lightweight out of the box so has very little start-time overhead. (And will not spin up agents like crazy.) pi might do worse if those things are actually important for solving the problem, but it certainly has a shot at being most efficient.

llmslave 39 minutes ago | parent

Amazon is so hopelessly behind in AI, nothing they produce aside from cloud infrastructure is actually good

The big threat to AWS is that coding agents dont need all of their complicated infrastructure, which was built for humans. Agents can use low level primitives, i.e. just a raw server

time0ut 33 minutes ago | parent

The sales pressure from them on their agent core stuff has been really shocking over the last six months. Never seen anything like it.

__alexs 31 minutes ago | parent

How are people using custom harnesses cost effectively? Do they avoid Anthropic models so they can use OpenAI subscription pricing and open weights stuff?

agentdev001 30 minutes ago | parent

Yes. Or- use them at work, where management is taking a... hands off approach to ~integrating ai~ into the workplace.

Juvination 25 minutes ago | parent

For what it's worth I've been using Anthropic models on Pi for months now with no issues. It's not recommended since it breaks TOS but you can do it.

everforward 25 minutes ago | parent

I use Pi and mostly open weight models. I pay for the $20/month Ollama plan and use Deepseek and GLM through that. I’ve never hit the limits on it, but I tend to ask for targeted things rather than “implement a whole feature in one prompt”.

I do keep an OpenRouter account topped up for things that Ollama doesn’t have. 99% of my usage there is embeddings, the other 1% is wanting to test some new model Ollama doesn’t have.

behole 15 minutes ago | parent

I'm using Opencode Go in OMP or Hermes. $10 a month and I have only ever hit a limit using qwen3.8MAX on X-High. This is a migration from 20x on Claude.

solarkraft 15 minutes ago | parent

That’s exactly what I do. OpenAI + Opencode Go subs, 0 interest in Claude.

zamalek 12 minutes ago | parent

OpenAI. It avoids Claudish too.

micromacrofoot 9 minutes ago | parent

pi on open weights, I only use frontier models to do a review pass

seizethecheese 30 minutes ago | parent

> With Fable 5, Strands harness cost 77% less than Claude Code and scored higher on Terminal Bench 2.1.

Terminal Bench 2.1 is saturated. Many token saving techniques would save money and score basically the same running Fable 5 against Terminal Bench 2.1. (They claim a better score but don’t say how much better. I’d bet my favorite hat that it’s not statistically significant.)

This is at least the fourth time I’ve seen a project hit front page with a “save money with same score on saturated benchmark” claim.

dwoosley 30 minutes ago | parent

I’m sure it was not a coincidence that this was released the day after Kimi 3 was added to bedrock.

hmokiguess 30 minutes ago | parent

Will they block me if I build an agent with this that shops on Amazon?

samusiam 29 minutes ago | parent

> But the moment you build your own agent, you’re on your own. It’s tricky wiring up the right primitives just well enough to match that “it just worked” feeling.

It's wild to me to claim that it's tricky to customize one of these harnesses and for that to be the entire justification for an entirely different harness.

It's really not that hard. If you want to reduce costs then all you need to do is practice delegation: instead of using the strong model, all the time to do everything, instead, you have the stronger model delegate well-defined tasks to a weaker model. Patterns like these are really easy to wire up.

seizethecheese 19 minutes ago | parent

Yes, it’s a wild claim. I built a harness for a random side project without even thinking hard about it. The harness was that from the hardest part of the project.

Is this corporate confabulation?

ChickeNES 28 minutes ago | parent

Does anyone else take these kinds of articles, drop them into ChatGPT, crank it up to Pro, and then have it write issues against your personal harness?

agentdev001 24 minutes ago | parent

"We noticed builders often wished their Claude Code or Codex setup could run in the cloud because locally their agent idea just “worked” with those harnesses.

But the moment you build your own agent, you’re on your own. It’s tricky wiring up the right primitives just well enough to match that “it just worked” feeling."

Im sorry, but who is saying this? If you just throw this statement into agent of your choice- and ask what native integrations exist to cover this use: OAI and Anthropic both have a handful of options here. Claude Agent SDK, Claude managed agents, Codex exec, Codex sdk, Codex app server, openai agents sdk, openai agents api.

agentdev001 14 minutes ago | parent

Beyond that though, I'm certainly interested in the performance side of things. "Keep an eye out for a follow-up paper from our researchers regarding these benchmarks." Yes plz.

johnmlussier 21 minutes ago | parent

I am increasingly hesitant to use non-native harnesses - model providers are now starting to train their agents for use within the harness. An eval like terminal bench can only capture so much data. I don't want to have to assess each harness every model release to make sure it's working as well as it can.

avaer 7 minutes ago | parent

This matters less as models get better and everyone settles on the same overall harness architectures. The model matters more than the harness anyway.

The bigger issue is that the use cases and harnesses for models is infinite, which is hard to compress into benchmark numbers that actually apply to you.

Everyone is benchmaxxing, desperate to sell, and almost nobody except the labs is doing actual science on the results, so harnesses tend to be chosen on voodoo and hunches, like which company made it. There isn't necessarily a good alternative though, bearing the cost of being a harness researcher is probably not many people's goal.

debarshri 16 minutes ago | parent

This seems to be from AWS team. Is that right?

Oras 15 minutes ago | parent

I remember reading about strands SDK and it looked great in terms how everything is an event that you can extend, so this harness feels quite about right.

However, for this kind of customisation, Pi is actually quite great. One of the most things I love about Pi is ability to ask it to create an extension and it does it quite well as it’s part of their docs. Also ability to customise the system prompt to avoid the clutter that Claude Code add (around 20k system prompt that mostly had nothing to do with the code).

The demo was showing something I have created for my Pi setup, which is asking me in each new session which skills and MCP I would to enable for the session. This works quite well if you have multiple projects where you don’t need all skills but just a small subset

ticulatedspline 14 minutes ago | parent

finally paying up for chatGPT and using the Codex desktop app was my real "I'm sold" moment with AI.

Setting up projects and working with the AI on local files has been great, but only for my personal account. I've been trying to get it set up for work that provides OpenAI models through a 3rd party tool, company hosted models, as local-machine models and the UX is just straight up awful.

there's no GUI for profiles or custom endpoints, the config.toml sucks and the overall experience is primitive.

At this stage I really want a Codex-like harness but I need more fluid control over the models, I want features like pinning a project to a provider, as well as pulling in all the models from that provider, also having all providers available.

So if I need to pop over to one project to consult about product A, then pop to another project to do some code analysis on product B I can do so fluidly and have my tokens billed to the right place for each concern.

or a project that can span all of the resources. like having the OpenAi models orchestrate sub-agents on the local or hosted models.