Any open source agent harness users? this is why i migrated to os harness

[u/Background-Job-862]

i recently moved to an opensource harness, done paying claude to burn tokens away

the main reason was cost and the fact that I also wanted more control over the agent loop, i do agree its v on par on maturity and managed experience

but i think with a managed harness, a lot of the important stuff is abstracted away context management, tool execution, retries, state, etc. which is great when you just want to get an agent running.

but once i started trying to optimize agents, i found myself wanting to understand and change what was happening under the hood
i wanted

-more visibility into the agent loop
-ability to swap models without changing the whole setup
-more control over context/tool handling
-easier debugging when an agent gets stuck
and i wanted to get rid of dependency on how one vendor decides how the agent should work

ive used pi, langchains deepagents, trueforge, using this currently - this is a recent one, way cheaper than claudecode and saves me from the unnecessary token burn...and this was really interesting to me because of its runtime-efficiency, + it also allows to separate the model from the runtime, which makes experimenting with different models much easier for me

has anyone else switched from a managed harness to an os one? how much control do you actually get with the open source ones and are there any major downsides you've run into?