alt Hacker NewsAfaict all harnesses are wrong in this respect, some of them deeply so.
Slash commands, for instance, are a misfeature. I should never have to wait for the chatbot finish a turn so that I can check on the status of my context window or how much money I've spent this session. Control should be orthogonal to the chat loop.
Even things that have nothing to do with controlling the text generator's input and output are entangled with chat actions for no good reason except "it's a chat thing, let's pretend we're operating an IRC bot".
There are a zillion LLM agents out there nowadays, but none of them really separate control from the agent loop from presentation well. (A few do at least have headless modes, which is cool.)
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In codex CLI /status works just fine during a turn.
Other things don't though.
I use the Codex desktop app.
In the GUI I can see the context indicator and usage stats.
It also makes it easier to jump between conversations and see the updates.
Sometimes I use Claude Code or opencode in the terminal, and my experience is much poorer compared to the Codex desktop app.
> Slash commands, for instance, are a misfeature. I should never have to wait for the chatbot finish a turn so that I can check on the status of my context window or how much money I've spent this session. Control should be orthogonal to the chat loop.
I get what you're trying to say but in practice architecting what you propose is considerably more difficult. Why not build it and try to get hired by one of the bigcos?