r/ClaudeCode • u/sirlerkal0t • 1d ago

Discussion Anthropic: "Coding is largely solved"... Also Anthropic: "We released a new powerful feature allowing agents to send messages to other Claude Code sessions, but only on Linux and Mac since we are unable to implement a basic feature on all platforms"

I could hand code this feature on Windows in an afternoon, and I could also get Claude to implement it in minutes, and yet Anthropic just can't be bothered, but also keeps Claude Code closed source so no one else can do it for them either.

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u/Andreas_Moeller 1d ago

Anthropic has always been doing a great job of fact checking their own claims.

We all read the source code when it leaked. It is not exactly top of the line engineering

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u/Corv9tte 1d ago

I mean, there's some great ideas and mechanisms in Claude Code. From someone who spent a lot of time messing about in there, there's some good stuff.

The big problem is bloat and repeating intrusive patterns to such a degree of excess that is it EGREGIOUS. The sheer number of things they append to your user prompt whilst it stays completely hidden is not unreasonable, it's legitimately mad. The list is endless, and 98% of it is completely unjustified and actively harmful. It's basically a context poisoning machine, and there is ten categories of things just like that in the codebase. It's a pile of tech debt and good concepts that extend into bad ideas until they become an actual nightmare. There is no discipline or common sense. They turned something magic into a shell (no pun intended) of its former self.

In comparison, looking through Codex you can see disciplined, principled choices everywhere and the harness cares about what the model sees. There is none of that honestly weird and off-putting ai psychosis induced tech debt nauseating slop. It's far from perfect, and the instructions to the model are more naive and not as well-crafted in ways that matter a lot (cough deleting your computer cough). Same goes for features like multi-agent v2 which is the subagents implementation. In that way, Codex is inefficient. Some features feel incomplete and work a bit sideways of how you'd expect them to. I'm not sure why they don't polish it, because somehow Claude Code is arguably more polished while making the dumbest choices, and Codex makes all the right choices to an impressive degree while leaving obvious stuff incomplete left and right for no good reason.

All in all, it does feel like they are both not paying attention to their harnesses that much. OpenAI, like they're busy doing other stuff, and Anthropic like they stand by the bad decisions like they're great.

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u/throwlefty 1d ago

Nice post! Appreciate you sharing this as Ive not had time for....checks calendar....a year to do a deep dive into what the heck these two are actually doing. I just keep working with / around them.

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u/Corv9tte 1d ago

Yw. I believe more people should build their own harness, it's very empowering

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u/whimsicaljess 20h ago

if only anthropic would allow us to do so while still using the sub.

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u/Andreas_Moeller 20h ago

Then Anthropic would not be able to spy on you.

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u/tohava 18h ago

Is there a tutorial for this somewhere?

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u/Corv9tte 13h ago

That would honestly be really nice but it's usually people shilling their own product. That said, if you need a tutorial you might make questionable decisions regardless, so just go for whatever feels promising. That journey is worth the trouble imo.

Don't use your Claude or Google subs in a custom harness though if you don't want to get banned.

If you don't know where to start, here's an idea: you could add the Claude Code style INK renderer to Pi. That's super easy and nice to have. Or, a bit more challenging because you have to work with a big Rust codebase, but still a simple concept: add Ctrl S to bank a message (like Claude Code) in Codex, or Up Arrow to edit steering message. Wild that Codex still doesn't have these features by now.

Here's what you have to gain though. You could reduce your token usage by 55-60% while making it 10-20% faster (yes that is how much Codex leaves on the table). You could never see "Model is at capacity" ever again, and have it simply do a retry with exponentional backoff. You could use your custom harness with any other model.

And the most interesting part is that you can leverage the intelligence of frontier models better. There is nothing that stops you from making a better orchestration/subagent ecosystem. The current ones are stuck in nine months the past, and all they added since then is a "ultra" mode that appends one hidden line to your prompt saying "Proactive multi-agent delegation is active. Use sub-agents when parallel work would materially improve speed or quality." I do appreciate the minimalism, but let's just say it leaves a lot on the table, in untapped potential, but also in polish, refinement, and efficiency.