"Claude Code is a harness or wrapper - it integrates with the user's terminal and routes prompts to the available Claude model in conjunction with other tools and a control loop that, together, make it what Anthropic calls an agentic coding tool. Many other tools serve as harnesses for models, such as OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity, Manus (recently acquired by Meta), OpenCode, Cursor, and Pi (the harness behind OpenClaw)."
"Harnesses exist because interacting with a machine learning model itself is not a great user experience - you feed it a prompt and it returns a result. That's a single-turn interaction. Input and output. To create a product that people care about, model makers have added support for multi-turn interaction, memory of prior interactions, access to tools, orchestration to handle data flowing between those tools, and so on."
"This can pose a business problem for frontier model makers - they've invested billions to train sophisticated models, but they risk being disintermediated by gatekeeping intermediaries that build harnesses around their models and offer a better user experience. One of the ways that Anthropic has chosen to build brand loyalty is by selling tokens to subscription customers at a monthly price, with usage limits, that ends up being less costly than pay-as-you-go token purchases through the Claude API. Essentially, the economics are similar to an all-you-can-eat buffet that's priced wi"
Anthropic revised legal terms to forbid use of third-party harnesses with Claude subscriptions to protect subscription economics. Anthropic sells subscriptions to the Claude platform, providing access to models (e.g. Opus 4.6) and tools like Claude Code, Claude.ai web interface, and the Claude Desktop application. Claude Code integrates with a user's terminal, routes prompts to Claude models with other tools and a control loop, creating an agentic coding tool. Multiple third-party harnesses exist, including OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity, Manus, OpenCode, Cursor, and Pi. Harnesses add multi-turn interaction, memory, tool access, and orchestration. Harnesses can disintermediate model makers. Anthropic sells token-based subscriptions priced below pay-as-you-go to build loyalty.
Read at Theregister
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]