Strands Harness

tontinton

Can you also compare in the charts https://maki.sh ? Should give you some competition.

fxwin

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

whattheheckheck

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

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

llmslave

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

__alexs

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

seizethecheese

> 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

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

hmokiguess

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

samusiam

> 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.

ChickeNES

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

"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.

johnmlussier

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.

debarshri

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

Oras

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

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.

seemaze

I their web icon a pepe frog? hard pass if so..

quincepie

so far I have seen many harnesses that are built to provide similar quality to the provider's harness for lower cost. Has there been any projects that prioritizes quality and quality consistency?

pizzuh

I'm more and more hesitant to use third party harnesses. It's so easy to take opencode or pi and build my own for exactly what I want that I'm seeing projects like this to be noisy and less valuable over time. I wish this wasn't the case. I love software, but it's becoming increasingly easy to just build my own.

aydgn

Tell your harness to fix overflow in header between 800-1400px.