DeepSeek released its own agent harness this August.
It crossed 66k stars in about a day (yes, sir!) and went over 200k by early September. That is already pretty crazy for something that is still a developer preview.
But while researching this post, I found something much more interesting. DeepSeek Harness actually uses Pi's model layer to connect to models outside DeepSeek. Yep.
The new agent runtime from DeepSeek uses Pi under the hood for part of its model support. And Tianyi Cui, who leads the Harness project, has publicly said Pi is a favourite daily driver for many people at DeepSeek. Lol.
That makes this comparison way more fun because they agree on quite a lot. Both think the harness matters, both are open source, both let you change a lot of the runtime, and both try to avoid locking you into one model.
