It's usually one of two things. First, I say I want to build this system solving this problem with these requirements, what do you suggest? It suggests X, then I say, "Hmm, why not Y?" and it goes, "Oh yeah, Y is better," etc.

It's similar to the situation where you ask whether you should walk or take the car to go refill the car with gas. I feel LLMs have a linearity embedded in them that prevents them from finding non-linear, smart solutions, especially when data is scarce. They can probably get it done, but with far more complex solutions, which increases the risk of ending up with a crazy complex codebase when it could have been much simpler and more elegant.

The other situation is when I spot a problem or a feature change that's needed after experiencing the product, and I ask how to change the codebase, it suggests something, I say "why not this other thing," and then we do the other thing.

I was in your situation some time ago. Good thing is that advanced (but little bloated, yes) harnesses have good enough defaults, so you don't have to go and read each setting before the use.

Regarding Pi my position is that it is brilliant piece of software if you don't need extensions - give the model bash tool and let it do all it wants through it or use Pi as SDK for your own advanced harness or smth similar.

But Pi with extensions has two problems. First one: rather often they don't play well together. For example, if you want some adjustments A and B for the same tool and there are two extensions which do A and B, they will likely not work as expected when installed simultaneously. You could say that it can be solved by adjusting extensions or just generating your own - yes and it is the second problem. Like any piece of code you own and use, you have to maintain it. Bug here, incompatibility there and voila - you spend your precious time to work on harness instead of doing your job. Plus remember that vibecoders are not very responsible people, so Pi extensions registry is flooded by "use Pi to customize Pi" buggy one shot extensions.

With carefully developed set of extensions Pi would be better, like properly configured Arch Linux could be better than Linux Mint in the hands of power user. But considering how fast things are changing in this sphere, seems it is more optimal to take more bloated harness - with unneeded tools, too big prompts, etc - which will be effective on 90%, but do the actual job with that harness right now.

It's all about trade-offs, do you want a bunch of extensions of varying quality from a bunch of developers, or do you want a bunch of extensions of varying quality from one developer?

I just didn't want to spend time configuring an harness

Do you import old code base or work on small greenfield projects?

I agree with you. I am a 5x user; compared to 6 months ago, I rarely reach session or weekly limits. It got slightly slower, but fewer mistakes make up for it. Probably the commenter above is a heavy vibe coder launching a bunch of background agents to reread the base code over and over.

Fireworks.ai has ZDR and hosts Kimi K3

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