9 posts
Agent = Model + Harness. The model is raw intelligence; the harness is the runtime that turns an unpredictable, amnesic model into a production system. The failure modes of unguided agents and the core primitives — resilient tool execution, context assembly, sandboxing, and bounded error escalation — that engineer reliability in.
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight Mixture-of-Experts model that trades blows with closed frontier labs on coding and reasoning — and you can download the weights. What it is, where it shines, and the tension between democratizing intelligence and shipping unfiltered power.
Firing your most expensive frontier model at every request is a structural defect. Model routing sends each query to the right model instead — cascade, classifier, and semantic routing, the traps that quietly kill your savings, and why orchestration is the new moat.
Every utility that translates tool-calling formats between LLM providers — LiteLLM, Bifrost, Portkey, claude-code-router, Vercel AI SDK, first-party /anthropic endpoints — what each one actually does, and the three failure classes none of them have solved. Plus the conclusion I arrived at: stop adapting context downward to each model, and build a harness that orchestrates harnesses instead.
A token-efficiency reading of the 'harness > model' thesis: the same model solved 6.7% of tasks bare vs 68% with the right harness — at 4× fewer tokens. What a harness is, why it's where the token bill actually lives, and what the Life-Harness and Meta-Harness papers prove. Plus how your Claude Code stack (subagents, skills, hooks, graphs) already is a harness.
GonkaGate hands out $10 of free balance with no card and no crypto top-ups. At ~$0.000334 per 1M tokens, that's enough for billions of Kimi K2.6 tokens — fuel for AI startups that burn through tokens. Inside: TPS tests and step-by-step setup for opencode and Hermes Agent.
How OpenClaude replaces per-provider wrapper commands (Clother, shell aliases) with a single ~/.openclaude/settings.json config — all models, all providers, one CLI.
How to use jolehuit/clother to switch Claude Code between Z.AI, Kimi, MiniMax, OpenRouter, Alibaba, Ollama, LM Studio and custom providers via clother-* commands — without rewriting ~/.claude or global env vars.
Working approaches to saving tokens in Claude Code and Opus 4.7/4.8: subagents, skills, hooks, Chinese models, knowledge graphs, RAG, xhigh effort, session management, summarization on a cheap model, input compression (headroom, pxpipe, mcp-compressor), and server-side savings (Tool Search, context editing, prompt caching, Batches API). A checklist to cut costs by 10x.