A controlled study shows that switching between coding-agent harnesses like Claude Code, OpenCode, or mini-SWE-agent barely moves pass rates more than rerunning the same setup. Cost per task, however, can triple, driven mainly by the system prompt that gets resent with every step. The article Fancy harnesses make coding agents more expensive but not better, study finds appeared first on The Decoder.
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How OpenSmartRoute helps
The router treats agents, tools and skills as targets in the same catalogue as models. An MCP tool or an A2A agent is one entry; the router picks it when it fits the request and learns from how it performs. The same guard and resource limits apply to a tool's arguments as to a prompt.
For a team that routes through the router, a release like this is one catalogue entry. The new model competes on the next request against what the team already runs, on quality, cost and speed. If it answers well it earns more traffic; if it fails it gets less, with no code change in the app.