I completely agree. I started with aichat[0] before the current agent trend and hit all kinds of bumps implementing agentic loops on my own. Then goose[1] showed me what a whole team working toward the same idea could do right before the official Claude Code harness which had all the bells and whistles. Now I know better what I want and its mostly less ram usage and a small set of primitives.

I still use Claude code (and codex and other big contenders) because they know what they are doing and innovate in ways I don't want to miss. And sometimes they are better at tasks.

[0]: 2023, https://github.com/sigoden/aichat [1]: 2024, https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose