> Something that is overlooked: the mainstream harnesses have a huge advantage in telemetry and datapoints to use to improve the harness. They have internal teams building the tooling. They have tight integration built-in with their own backends (e.g. optimizing for caching).
> Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool.
Do I want to become completely dependent on the pricy pay-as-you-go tool? In the long run that will make me powerless.
You'll be dependent on it whether or not you use the main harnesses. You pay for the model. The frontier models will likely always be better than the open source ones.