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Opinionated and easy Pi.dev configuration
- clusterhacks 3mo agoOn the one hand, sure, why not have a default install throw a bunch of bells+whistles via skills and extensions. But I like pi precisely because it is so minimal. I want understand and work around the simplest possible agentic coding setup, find the sharp edges, maybe even improve my prompting ability. And doing all three with a locally hosted LLM. At some point, if I don't understand the foundations, am I just punting on actually thinking about what I'm doing? Of course, making individual choices about how to do agentic coding are precisely just making individual choices. People should do what makes them happy and productive.
- amwal 3mo agohaha i was waiting for this exact thing lazyvim:vim::pi:lazypi, thanks for sharing
- verdverm 3mo agoIf you like OpenCode, there is a vim input plugin (only one I use) https://github.com/Tarquinen/opencode-vim https://github.com/Tarquinen/opencode-vim
- whitefang 3mo agoWhy does this makes more sense over OpenCode?
- pqtyw 3mo agoI personally find OpenCode's TUI atrociously awful, I guess a matter of taste.
- polski-g 3mo agoThe memory footprint of Opencode is prohibitive to run 10+ copies at once.
- esafak 3mo agoJust use the web/desktop app and you won't need to.
- puppymaster 3mo agoNow you have 2 problems. That freaking thing is a memory hog in itself and guess why - ELECTRON.
- c0rruptbytes 3mo agoi think to fall in love with Pi, bundled skills are a bit antithetical - you realistically only need a couple of skills that you maybe design yourself
- klaxce 3mo agoPi makes you think about what you’re doing with it on purpose. This defeats that, as the Mario quote on the page says, and therefore isn’t worth using. People really need to try out “less is more”. The new models are quite smart, so suffocating their context with dozens of MCPs and skills isn’t necessary like it used to be. A cli tool with good built in help and good errors is amazingly easy for the model to figure out. If Pi is too minimal for you and you don’t want to dig into it, OpenCode is pretty good out of the box. I use it for general work I haven’t setup Pi for. The only thing I add to OpenCode is some commands that are shortcuts to save me typing frequent prompts, and a subagent with a fixed model for implementing changes.
- knuckleheads 3mo agoWould you say the same about something like, say, Spacemacs?
- klaxce 3mo agoNo, I don’t think I would. Filling the model’s context with a bunch of junk and actively making it perform worse isn’t the same as adding opinionated defaults/settings. The GPT-5.6 announcement just made it clear that these huge agents files are actually doing more harm than good. If this just added skins or something I wouldn’t be arguing against it.
- klaxce 3mo agoOops. It wasn’t in the announcement, it’s in their Prompting Best Practices. I just noticed it because of the announcement. https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/latest-model#use-shorter-prompts https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/latest-model#u...
- surgical_fire 3mo agoI like the Pi approach, but I think I didn't "hold it correctly" so to say. I would like to migrate away from Claude Code and use Pi as my "peimary" harness. I really like in particular how it manages conversation trees and branches. But I think I didn't do a good job in customizing it for my work. While nothing dramatic, I think the LLM I was using did a better job on Claude Code than on Pi a couple of time when I tried giving it the same work. I was not sure how to improve on it though.
- overflowy 3mo agoThis thing defeats the whole purpose of Pi.
- all2 3mo agoI use lazyvim for all my neovim config. Does it fly in the face of the configurability or minimalism of vim? I'd argue no, but rather it is an expected outcome of a highly configurable system. Some people don't want to think about this kind of thing, they just want something that works.
- xlii 3mo agoYes, because neovim != vim :)
- yjftsjthsd-h 3mo ago> Does it fly in the face of the configurability Probably not. > or minimalism of vim? I'd have to say at least a bit? Which is totally fine if it works for you, but there's gotta be some amount of extra features added after which "minimal" stops being a good description. Edit: Although, we should also acknowledge that minimalism is a sliding scale. Compared to plain vi, vim is bloated. Compared to a full blown traditional IDE, lazyvim probably is minimal.
- docheinestages 3mo agoI think the developers of Pi made a supply chain mistake by stripping down the core agent and requiring features like subagents to load plugins written by some random person.
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 3mo agoPi is meant for people who know what they are doing. If you dont fall into that category use OpenCode, etc. The whole idea is that you customize Pi to your own needs by asking it to modify itself through extensions. That said, sometimes it is really easy to leverage existing extensions. You run the risk of supply chain attack though. I installed one extension that was useful, modified it to my needs and pinned it.
- ljm 3mo ago> Pi is meant for people who know what they are doing How many people genuinely know what they're doing when the value prop of Pi is basically to vibe code it to your taste? The entire point of vibe coding being that you don't actually have to know what you're doing?
- AgentMasterRace 3mo agoif you know what you're doing your results will actually be good. what a dumb take.
- mdgld 3mo agoThat’s why Mario said “YOLO” is enabled by default from what I remember—something like, I want you to think about what you’re doing.
- alexjameson 3mo agoNot necessarily. I had almost no idea what I was doing when I started using Pi. The goal was to learn harness engineering and understand how it feels like thinking about things that are provided in other harnesses by default. It took time to learn all of these before I managed to do something similarly useful as OpenCode, and now I am ready to use some sane defaults for things that I really know I need in Pi.
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- roger_ 3mo agoCurrently using Oh My Pi (https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi) and appreciate the batteries included approach. From my limited time using pure Pi, I found quite a few of the plugins lacking and had no desire to upgrade/fix and maintain them myself. I know others feel differently though. I like the idea of keep Pi minimal but having “official”, high quality optional plugins to make it more usable.
- beepbooptheory 3mo agoAs AI outsider, can you speak to how you draw the line here? Like doesn't the agential blahblah make upgrades/maintenance trivial? When do you get it to make you the thing versus choosing to vendor something out like back in the day?
- evilduck 3mo agoMaking the upgrades or maintaining or crafting from scratch a plugin isn't free, it costs tokens and time and attention. And you're almost assuredly reinventing a wheel that someone else already did and probably did better. I like have the ability, but I prefer not needing it.
- roger_ 3mo agoFunny you mention that because the OMP GitHub issues (https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi/issues https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi/issues) is almost exclusively attended to by a very efficient bot. I routinely submit issues and they’re replicated and resolved (via PRs) in ~30 mins. To your question: it’s the difference between one person and an agent working on something vs an experienced dev and the entire community. Time and tokens too of course.
- kzrdude 3mo agoOh-my-pi seems to like robo coding, while pi itself is entirely against vibe coding for production. (The clanker is a tool, not a free wheeling agent.) And I see that tonight pi has had their regular devs ship (https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tags https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tags) new releases with modified thinking levels for GPT-5.6 while roboomp is discussing this back and forth with some contributors in oh-my-pi's repo.
- richardlblair 3mo agoI've been using oh-my-pi for a while and I'm very happy with it. If you're not going to build out your own Pi setup I'm not sure why you'd pick this over oh-my-pi.
- Jackevansevo 3mo agoThis seems to be like the antithesis of pi, it's supposed to be this minimal thing you customise I guess it's the same kinda friction with vanilla vim/neovim vs vim 'distributions' that provide a bunch of stuff out of the box.
- whazor 3mo agoIt looks exactly like neovim plugin ecosystem and I was waiting for someone to make this. I tried pi before but the gap between codex and pi is too big for me to be productive. Ideally lazypi is easy to disable or add plugins as well.
- twohaibei 3mo agoThere is also mentioned oh my pi - i recommend trying it out.
- nzoschke 3mo agoWhat AGENTS.md and skills are people relying on these days? I have little to none and am successful building full stack Go apps Claude Code, Codex, and Shelley which covers the spectrum of crazy black box to simple `bash` clanker. It makes me think the models are continually improving in knowing what to do on their own. I do put some major work into the classic "Developer Experience" (DX) of my code base. Standard Go tooling, idiomatic Go, well designed initial test harnesses, GitHub actions that enforce some linting. I think that works better than any markdown instructions ever will.
- ljm 3mo agoNothing in (AGENTS|CLAUDE).md, no Cursor style rules. Just some skills for Jira/Confluence, CI, and Playwright. Haven't bothered doing any extra customisation in Claude Code or Codex as I don't really trust those things to apply consistently. And if you can run your CI steps locally before you push you don't need to tell an agent to remember it. That said I've been playing with pi today and given how stripped down it is I've used it as a sandbox for customisation. Still, I haven't gone quite as far as laying down project level instructions. More that Claude Code in particular is quite heavy, and so it its prompt, and adding stuff like rich integration with GitHub and SourceHut (CI status, active branch or PR) seems comparatively trivial in pi. Only thing left to do is switch out ghostty for the time being as it's misbehaving. Laptop hot to the touch even after idling overnight.
- mdgld 3mo agoI’ve tried quite a few, from oh-my-openagent’s gargantuan hooks+plugin system to minimal add-i like wozcode, and I’ve been most impressed by that (wozcode) and oh-my-pi. I get that pi is supposed to be roll-your-own but I think OMP’s config is a great starting point; pi removed all the fluff and OMP added just enough orchestration and tooling back in to take things to the next level. Wozcode is great if you like CC because it doesn’t mess with the fundamentals, it just adds things like batching for efficiency—CC’s system prompt alone is absurd. Caveat: I’m a data scientist/researcher, not a professional SWE, so take my experiences with a grain of salt. I’m just a python monkey most of the time
- mikeocool 3mo ago
- jabroni_salad 3mo agoI like peeping at other people's skills but it is unclear to me what/where the claimed 60+ skills are actually located. Compound Engineering conveys a few but nowhere near 60.
- SwellJoe 3mo ago"One command installs 60+ community skills, 67 themes, MCP support, sub-agent support, Claude Code CLI provider support, memory, and more." What, no kitchen sink?
- lfx 3mo ago60+ ! oh my, while this is cool it seems that is overkill. I want to know all my skills back and forth. But I like this kind of projects where I can peak of what extensions other people use. Is like .vimrc file back in the day. Do not clone blindly, but peak, learn and copy what is needed.
- yegle 3mo agoIt's like supply chain attack on steroids! /s
- ely-s 3mo agoFor me, the benefit of pi is what it doesn't do.
- getcrunk 3mo agoIs there a popular well support add on that like lets me hitl/interact with my phone while not at my desk?
- dofm 3mo agoI am not going to use this, I think, because I believe I am at the point where going through the "process" with Pi will be valuable to me. But it's a useful list of things and they are links.
- sdevonoes 3mo agoI want to use Pi, but I don’t trust the npm ecosystem at all. I could use a VMs, but I guess it’s just not worth it
- alexhans 3mo agoI can understand someone being overwhelmed and not wanting to configure and "build your own pi" which is really one of the beautiful points of pi, but like with vim, I do recommend that after playing with this for a while you go back to pure pi and then decide what do you really need and incrementally add it. The power of the incremental in control approach is huge. It allows you to keep moving in whatever direction you want instead of taking yet another dependency.
- samtheprogram 3mo agoSecond this. I went back to vanilla zsh after oh-my-zsh. Turns out I really just wanted 2 features that are built into zsh, and a custom prompt that includes git info that I just wrote myself in ~20 neat, readable lines of shell (minus the ANSI coloring). I maintain vim and neovim confugs, never going with a distribution of plug-ins, and can't imagine how grotesque those must be. The difference here though is that zsh and vim are old projects. My configs with them never break. I can't say the same about neovim, and Pi also probably isn't stable.
- WhyNotHugo 3mo agoPi is perfectly usable in its "raw" state (except perhaps an extension for your specific provider, if not built in). Configuring it isn't really overwhelming: you use it for a while and then find that you'd want to extend it with some particular functionality.
- alentred 3mo ago> 67 themes Hm. Most users usually need 0 or 1 of those at a time. Makes me question other choices in there.
- getnormality 3mo ago> One command. Everything configured. Nothing to research. Being talked at by someone's AI copypasta feels like being in the Truman Show. "Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococo drink? All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua, no artificial sweeteners!" "What the hell are you talking about? Who're you talking to?"
- snthpy 3mo agoHow risky is pi-claude-cli? Don't want to get the account banned.
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