Making budget models punch above their weight with a smart harness

Dirge: the coding agent that fits in your pocket and punches above its weightDirge is an agentic harness that I've been developing for my own use, and it's getting to the point where it's becoming generally useful. In this post, I'll discuss some of the rationale behind it and the interesting features it provides which differentiate it from other agentic harnesses.The first thing to note is its performance. Most existing coding tools like OpenCode are rather memory-intensive, often using around 300 MB of RAM even when sitting there doing nothing. Dirge is written in Rust, which compiles to a tiny binary file weighing in at about 30 MB. When Dirge starts up, it needs only around 8 MB of RAM while idle, while working on tasks pushes that up to roughly 15 MB. So you could run twenty copies of Dirge at the same time for the cost of a single instance of OpenCode.However, lean size alone is not the main point, and there are other Rust-based harnesses to choose from. What makes Dirge…