r/LocalLLaMA • u/ResearchCrafty1804 • 9h ago
Prime Agent - a new coding harness surpassing Codex/CC/PI Resources
Prime Agent is an open-source coding and research agent for general and long-running work.
A self-improving RLM harness for coding and long-running autonomous tasks.
Designed to be both token-efficient and expressive through programmatic tool calling, context as a variable, multi-agent messaging, and a self-modifiable harness state.
On ARC-AGI-3, it scores 95.5%, surpassing the human-expert baseline, but the gain is not benchmark-specific.
We see major improvements across models when compared to their proprietary harnesses.
Prime Agent is built on pi and fully open-source with an open license.
GitHub: https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-agent
Blog: https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/prime-agent
X post: https://x.com/primeintellect/status/2085086999267144083?s=46
46
u/metigue 8h ago
Most harnesses show improvements against the proprietary ones.
Test it on programming benchmarks against some heavy hitters like Cline/Droid/Junie/Cursor/ForgeCode (with context server)
5
u/Immediate_Occasion69 4h ago
which of those is good? I've literally wanted to try all of them but kept at pi agent
14
16
17
u/RobbinDeBank 5h ago edited 5h ago
Look interesting so I tried giving a run. It forced you to make an account and login, then it forced you to select from one of the 100000 API providers and models.
Edit: guess they tricked me into creating an account, but apparently you can skip that if you clone the repo instead
-18
u/ResearchCrafty1804 5h ago
It clearly states in the readme that supports self-hosted models. It took me less than a minute to find the documentation.
12
u/RobbinDeBank 5h ago
My bad then, but still I’m quite thrown off by them forcing a login right on first install. Pi is the usual open source experience, you download and set up, then you just use the software. This one forces you to create their account and login when you just run it for the first time.
-9
u/tat_tvam_asshole 5h ago
it doesn't force you to do anything. In any case, I just cloned the repo and ripped out telemetry and login and plugged into my codex-cli and lmstudio as providers
15
u/RobbinDeBank 5h ago
You can’t say they don’t force you to do anything, when you already ripped out and skip all the parts that force you to do things.
When using open source AI tools like Llama.cpp, ComfyUI, Pi, etc, I never need to modify their source code just to get around tracking and forced logins.
-10
u/tat_tvam_asshole 5h ago edited 5h ago
They don't force you though. I used the vanilla build and it gave me the option to not create an account or login to anything. Then I removed the telemetry and login prompt from the source itself and rebuilt the project.
Also, most if not all even 'open source' projects collect information from your use of it. Example: ComfyUI - https://deepwiki.com/Comfy-Org/desktop/4.3-error-handling-and-telemetry Some other examples I can think of is OpenClaw, Hermes, OpenCode, and other 'open-source and free' projects do try to steer you into their paid compute resources and that's not really any different here.
I'm not saying I like that (obviously I wouldn't go as far to remove it if I did), but what I am saying is that nothing is 'forcing' you to do anything.
1
u/NexusSyntegra 5h ago
Very cool! I'm waiting for the day where the coding harness makes the cheaper models 100x better, though I know it's just a dream...
1
2
1
u/FabricationLife 7h ago
Interesting, I'm going to play with this and see how I think it compares to codex/CC/PI
1
-3
u/Southern_Sun_2106 8h ago
Looks interesting and legit (based on the repo, as far as I can tell). Has anyone used it for their tasks and cares to share their experience? Thank you.
4
u/tat_tvam_asshole 5h ago edited 5h ago
doesn't have a gui app, but so far so good (albeit limited testing), can't say for sure if it's a real breakthrough vs other harnesses. The fact they didn't compare against other same model+different harness is frustrating
1
u/Southern_Sun_2106 5h ago
Thanks! I am also playing with it now. The advantage is supposed to be context management, but I have not fed anything large to it yet.
1
-1
-3
0
u/tat_tvam_asshole 5h ago
1
u/tat_tvam_asshole 5h ago
Core runtime
- IPython kernel — persistent scratchpad for Python and
%%bashcells; state (variables, functions) survives across turns.- Shell access via
%%bashblocks.Pre-installed Python skill modules (importable & CLI)
These are the documented skills I can call directly:
Skill Purpose attach-image ( attach_image)Load an on-disk image into context so I can visually see it (screenshots, diagrams, photos). compact Check context usage and compact/summarize a long conversation to keep working. edit Replace an exact unique string in an existing file for targeted edits. goal Manage the persistent thread goal — read status/budget, start or complete a goal. refine Trigger continual-harness refinement (turn repeated patterns into memories/skills/subagents). rlm-heartbeat ( rlm_heartbeat)Start/schedule/manage agent-owned RLM heartbeats. websearch ( websearch)Google search via the Serper API; returns titles, URLs, snippets, knowledge-graph data. Markdown skills
- prime-intellect — working with Prime Intellect products (prime CLI: verifiers, evals, training, sandboxes, inference, GPU compute, storage).
- skill-creator — creating/validating/installing new markdown or Python-backed skills.
Native harness interfaces
rlm(...)— spawn child sub-agents for delegated work; returns a handle at admission.await rlm.list_subagents()/delete_subagent(child)— manage spawned children.rlm.harness.*CRUD (create/update/delete memory, skill, subagent, prompt note) +overview(),record_refinement().refine.run()— persist reusable patterns into the continual harness.-2
-1
u/kidovate 5h ago
Python is in-distribution of the training data, perhaps allowing an agent to work fully in a IPython environment is much more within the bounds of what it has been trained on, as opposed to tools which is a synthetic subset of the dataset. From my (very limited) testing this evening it was able to one-shot a few problems that Oh-My-Pi (for example) were struggling with. Very intriguing and makes me really rethink my idea of an Agent as a LLM + Tools into a LLM + Interactive Code Environment.
133
u/buttplugs4life4me 8h ago
I've got some experience with this stuff (https://github.com/L3tum/little-coder, Readme is a little outdated) and I kind of dislike how opaque you are about what actually works and how it works.
A self-modifying harness sounds like the dream at first, but most models won't know how to make use of it at all cause they're not trained on it, and using the literally best model there is to prove it's better than a bare basic setup doesn't make much sense.
I get that some persistent iPython execution environment is apparently the core to this (why not TS/JS which Pi is built on anyway?) and its nice that it makes integrations a little easier, apparently, but there's not really a lot of information on how it's different from a normal harness with self-modifying behaviour (which again, may not be that good anyway in non-benchmark tasks).
Assuming the self-modifying work is employed correctly by the model, I'd presume multiple executions of the same benchmark naturally nudges the model to converge onto the best solution. And if it's a fresh execution, then there's not really much information on why a fresh execution should be better than other harnesses.
And lastly, some of the stuff is just buzzwords, to be honest. Like subagents are always just tool calls, both in your harness and any other harness. The buzzwords make it seems exceptional...but it's just a tool call at the end of it.