Top all-time · #5914
Stencil
Company blog · stencil.so/blogaiprogramming
Stencil is the company blog at stencil.so, writing about ai and programming. Since 2026, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 13 times, most often “You only need the frontier model for one single edit”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Posts from the team behind the oh-my-pi (omp) coding-agent harness on agent harness design, tool-calling rates, context compaction, and the cost of plan mode.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
New instruments for building software. Stencil builds omp, an open-source coding-agent harness, and publishes engineering research.
Most-linked posts?
- You only need the frontier model for one single edit5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-07-14
- We improved 15 LLMs at coding in one afternoon. Only the harness changed3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-08-12
- Snapcompact: SoTA compaction – instant, local, free. Pick 32 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-08-01
What Hacker News says?
There's some pretty interesting evidence that this feature actually just increased costs: https://stencil.so/blog/prewalk
Comment linking /blog/prewalk
on “Plan mode is dead”Submitted Oh-my-pi – The Harness Playbook as a story · 35 points
HN discussionIn this vein I’ve started using Tern ( https://stencil.so/tern ), but it’s closed beta, from the creator of Oh My Pi. This space seems to be heating up, everyone wanting to build the single pane of glass for agentic work.
Comment linking /tern
on “Herdr has released native app”Submitted We improved 15 LLMs at coding in one afternoon. Only the harness changed as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCan't edit my post anymore, but here's the omp blog from February talking about improved tool calling rates across 15 models, with only the harness being tweaked to get the improvements. https://stencil.so/blog/the-harness-problem Three GLM models are mentioned, but so is Deepseek, Grok, Minimax, Kimi, and Gemini.
Comment linking /blog/the-harness-problem
on “GLM-5.3: Frontier Coding with Emergent Cyber Capabilities”Submitted Snapcompact: SoTA compaction – instant, local, free. Pick 3 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://stencil.so/blog/snapcompact - some agents (notably oh my pi, i forget which others) come with snapcompact as a primary means of compaction. Take the entire context, stick it in a small font in a PNG, and vision capable models can summarize and pull out the most useful information in many fewer vision tokens than the original context used. I've not used it myself, but it's there.
Comment linking /blog/snapcompact
on “DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp”Submitted You only need the frontier model for one single edit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionObligatory - everyone should try Pi. I've been using it since I came across it via the excellent https://stencil.so/blog/the-harness-problem blog in December. After being a Claude-hater for the last few months, frustrated with weird verbosity and slow churning response, not to mention dealing with a full-organisations worth of shared skills and giant CLAUDE.md docs slowing everything down - super-light Pi is a delig…
Comment linking /blog/the-harness-problem
on “Ask HN: What models and harnesses are you using that are not Claude or Codex?”Submitted You only need the frontier model for one single edit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi https://stencil.so/blog/prewalk most advanced, configurable and capable harness of all time, and i use both 200$ subs with it. Has a huge learning curve though so if you're not into that i'd go with whatever you already use the most
Comment linking /blog/prewalk
on “Ask HN: Claude Code or Codex?”Submitted You only need the frontier model for one single edit as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> We upstreamed it to omp For those not sufficiently cracked... what is omp? Is there a way I can have this command or workflow in Cursor / Claude Code? I tried going to the homepage ( https://stencil.so/ ). It didn't really help.
Comment linking /
on “You only need the frontier model for one single edit”
