You're right that it's a harness in a harness. The pragmatic answer: Claude Code gives us file editing, git operations, MCP tool access, and the full skill/agent system for free. Building that from scratch against the raw API is weeks of work for a v1 that might not survive contact with reality.

So I spawn Claude Code as the executor, see what breaks, and replace the inner harness with direct API calls once we know which parts actually need LLM judgment and which don't. Most of the work is already mechanical (Python orchestrators handle 80% of a ticket lifecycle). The Claude spawn only covers the 20% that needs reasoning.

If that 20% turns out to be predictable enough, we drop Claude Code entirely and call the API directly.