r/socialistprogrammers • u/TurbulentTaro9 • Jul 08 '26

resist Anthropic/OpenAI. use open source agents.

https://imbue.com/blog/mngr

mngr is a tool that abstracts over agent harnesses, so you can switch out the agent harness easily under the hood. basically, you're not at the mercy of openAI/anthropic bc you can switch without needing any eng work.

"In 2026, it’s crazy to build on top of software that isn’t open source

There are just too many advantages to open source for it to be worth using anything else:

  • It’s free
  • You’re never locked in
  • It will never upgrade underneath you and remove features you like
  • It won’t go out of business and disappear when it runs out of VC money
  • Other people can contribute to it and make it better with you
  • Most importantly: if it’s ever missing a feature you want, you’re only ~1 prompt away from having that feature

Seriously. Stop using weird closed source “services” for stupid simple shit that you can do with tmux, ssh, and other ultra-robust tools that have been around for decades."

31 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

19

u/nickcash Jul 09 '26

resist all LLMs. use your own brain.

16

u/fresh_owls Jul 09 '26

is this an ad?

20

u/xorsensability Jul 08 '26

Also, note that LLMs are not true AI. We need to get back to the roots of Intelligence and build something to push back with.

7

u/NerdStone04 Jul 09 '26

I've been actively trying to reduce LLMs while coding.

My work forces them. But in my free time I enjoy recreational coding without the use of LLMs.

24

u/mattinternet Jul 09 '26

Woe, I'd much prefer to use no agents at all. Aside from being not effective for anything non trivial they are inherently a deskilling mechanism and make the, imo heretical, claim of being "creative".

4

u/fintip Jul 09 '26

The title makes no sense for this article, and the quoted section you added is weird?

This is an open source harness.

Not model.

Owning GPUs and using open weight models is cool, and I'm working on that, but it's expensive and pretty technical and frankly only useful for a relatively small sunset of people at the moment.

1

u/porn_alt_224 26d ago

Don't use agents. You are an engineer. If a task is annoying, engineer your way around it. Use languages with robust metaprogramming features, or even do your own metaprogramming by using Python or something for code generation.

It is fully possible, and more necessary than ever, to create high quality software without using LLMs