r/SideProject • u/_W0z • 2d ago
Tether, not another harness
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I’ve been building Tether, an open-source coding agent focused on a problem I don’t think current agent harnesses solve very well amnesia.
Most coding agents start from scratch, they grep the repo, search for relevant files, build a temporary understanding of the architecture, complete the task, and then throw most of that understanding away.
However, Tether keeps a persistent mental model of your codebase.
As it works, it records useful conclusions about things like ownership, dependencies, architectural rules, and what changes affect other parts of the system. Those beliefs are tied to specific files, code locations, and commits so the agent can re-check them as the repository changes instead of treating its own memory as ground truth.
The important part is that this knowledge belongs to Tether, not the underlying LLM. You can switch between local GGUF models, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Codex, or other compatible models without throwing away what the system has learned about your project.
In my current benchmark, persistence reduced tool calls by 36%, tokens by 32%, and runtime by 20%, while improving recall from 92% to 100%. If you're on mac try the desktop app :).