Why Fight Against It

When it comes to agent harnesses, this is a question I have been asking myself a lot over the last week. Both OpenAI and Anthropic released new models, and since older models never seem to work quite as well after a new model release, I changed my Hermes agent defaults to GPT 6 SOL and Opus 5.5.

And then I spent the remainder of the week cleaning up all the things that broke as a result of the model change. Sigh.

"So Steve, you idiot, you know these models work much better in their developers' harnesses, why do you persist torturing yourself trying to make them work in an open source harness?" was the question I asked more than once.

Because I remember. Was my answer.

I remember Novell. The default standard for office LAN networking back in the day. It were never good imo. I knew it, but I went with the flow and installed it for many clients. IPX, sheesh. Later, I uninstalled it for many clients and put in systems that afaik are still working today. The clients never blamed me for installing Novell, but I did.

I remember many proprietary answers to computing and networking. Mostly crap. Mostly hailed as the best thing ever, with many marketing dollars masquerading as substance to back up the claim. And mostly all gone now.

I would go as far as to say that much of what produces real value in IT today owes something to the pressure applied by open source developments. Yes, looking directly at you Windows 11.

What I want is my own agency. I want to choose the models I use and determine the parameters of my own agents, rather than have Anthropic, OpenAI, or heaven forbid Grok decide those things for me. A proprietary harness might save me a great deal of pain and frustration. I don't deny that. But I don't want the price of convenience to be giving up those choices.

There is a large pushback against Chinese models, often on security grounds. Fine, security matters. But why should I regard a Chinese company with suspicion and an American company with trust? If the concern is that a company might use its control over the technology against my interests, the nationality of the company does not make the concern disappear. And American companies have every commercial reason to encourage suspicion of their Chinese competitors. Fear, doubt and uncertainty always lurk at the bottom of the competitive marketing strategy barrel.

If you are happy to have a large American corporation in control of, and dictating to you, how your business should conform to its vision to be competitive, then fine. All power to you.

Me? I think I'll continue to walk my own path, and suck up the pain.