38 ms·

Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

551 points by luispa 2mo ago

p1necone 2mo ago
I love hacking away at pi extensions. I realised how use case dependent harness behaviour is when I tried to use my customised-for-a-side-project pi config at work and realised I needed to tweak it significantly to be useful - I would not be surprised if tools like Claude Code needing to be all things for all people is hurting their peak usefulness.
- CharlieDigital 2mo ago
  End up building Pi extensions instead of actual product. Doesn't make sense to me, but to each their own.
  - impulser_ 2mo ago
    Yeah, but the future will essentially be building extensions for agents. Agents will become the new web browser and extensions will be the new apps. We are already seeing the early stages of this.
    - CharlieDigital 2mo ago
      how many extensions do you need for browsing the web? Adblocker. Not much else because the browser already does the important work. Same with any of the off the shelf harnesses. Go build something useful instead of tweaking the minutiae of the harness.
      - impulser_ 2mo ago
        You don't need any extensions to use Pi. You can get far without any.
  - jmuguy 2mo ago
    Yeah this seems pretty strange to me, I feel like I don't really care about messing around with all the tooling surrounding AI. I just want to get my actual work done. When I first moved to VS Code from Sublime Text I think I spent maybe 15 minutes setting up a few extensions like Emmet and then never really thought about it again - because I had actual work to do. I've just been waiting for all the constant change around AI coding to die down, assuming whatever is best will emerge and then I'll just use that.
malisper 2mo ago
Having tried all the coding harnesses, I find that using Pi is exactly like using Emacs. For anything you want to build you can ask your agent and it will build it. There's tons of existing code to help you configure it. At the same time half the code is buggy, UI elements will try to overlap one another, and you'll periodically get crashes. If you're willing to put in the work to master the learning curve and push through the issues, it can be a great tool: https://i.sstatic.net/7Cu9Z.jpg https://i.sstatic.net/7Cu9Z.jpg
- azuanrb 2mo ago
  Never learned Emacs but am a Neovim user. But similar to what I said to my colleagues as well. Codex, Claude Code are VS Code, Jetbrain. Pi is Neovim.
  - dasil003 2mo ago
    It's funny you say this, because as someone that rejected emacs (default editor was XEmacs on the Sun machines in my 90s CS computer lab) in favor of vim early. I think a big part of the appeal of vim for me is that it's a great editor just based on the defaults. Sure you can configure it but you don't need to. Emacs strength is customization, and that's what Pi feels like compared to batteries-included harnesses. I understand both world views and both are legitimate. But I do feel like LLMs are advancing so quickly that it's not a good use of my time to optimize harnesses at this point. I have actual work to do, so sharpening my tools needs to be selective and time-boxed. Personally I'm staying agnostic on harness, not locking into Codex or Claude Code, but also not prematurely optimizing things that tens of thousands of other tools-focused developers are going deep on across the ecosystem. My goal is not to be an early adopter but to reap the benefits of all that experimentation.
  - MattPerry 2mo ago
    I agree. Pi is more like NeoVim if we have to map to Vim/Emacs. Emacs is full (at least compared to Vim) of the hidden features you didn't know it had installed. Pi doesn't bundle any hidden features. A bog standard GNU Emacs install contains, what, like ~10 games, a mail reader, a web browser, RSS feed reader, a nd a Morse code decipher? Even more so, Pi even has opinionated forks and "distributions" like oh-my-pi that are like LazyVim/AstroVim.
behnamoh 2mo ago
Literally every AI project ends up getting monetized even (read: especially) if it starts as open source. It's only a matter of time before π's enshittification kicks in.
- nrb 2mo ago
  Why is this relevant though? This project is so minimal that forking it at any point since it started “mainstreaming” and implementing any functionality that came after would have been utterly trivial.
- unknownfuture 2mo ago
  Eh, it's open source. If its closed, fork it, move on. It's entire raison d'etre is to have a very minimal core so it's nature is that the base product isn't actually where the magic exists, but in the extensibility and the ecosystem. It'd be very tough to close that back down now that it's open.
- josh_p 2mo ago
  Mario talked about the Earendil transition in his blog post here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/ Him and Armin especially, have been involved in OSS for years and have worked hard to build communities around projects they’ve built and maintained. We’ve all seen enough projects become what you’re afraid of, Mario included. I’m optimistic that they’ll keep true to their goal of keeping pi open while building their other products around it. I think they understand the community dynamics necessary to keep a project like pi going. And they want it to succeed that way.
peterldowns 2mo ago
We built our first version of our in-app agent with opencode, but we're probably going to switch to Pi. Fundamentally, Pi is the shape of the thing that should exist, and it's awesome to see that it works. Very satisfying to my engineering brain. Been having fun with ohmypi as my personal harness, but going to switch over to pi soon and just mess around with it until it works the way I want. The idea of completely personalized software is so cool and now that it's finally possible I am having so much fun.
- zahrevsky 2mo ago
  Haven't heard of ohmypi, thanks! I feel like this is a good starting point for someone like me who is not ready to configure a harness from zero right now.
  - catlover76 2mo ago
    [dead]
codemog 2mo ago
Pi has the best code out of all coding agents. The only problem is it’s not as fully featured and some of its modules should be factored out into their own code base.
pavo-etc 2mo ago
I've had a lot of success running Pi on my server in headless mode and wrapping it in an XMPP client. This means I can talk to it wherever I can access XMPP (everywhere). It also mean agents can talk to each other when they need to. They've got a shared wiki they interact with and github issues as their todo list. I am running several named pi instances in parallel in their own user account on NixOS, so they can install whatever they want in ephemeral shells and I never need to worry about their env. The agents can spin up new enabled XMPP agents if I request it, though for now I've only needed a few since I'm not doing too much in parallel. My Pi is very vanilla, only my own XMPP wrapper and pi-subagents extension for anonymous subagents. Using it primarily with Deepseek v4 Flash for chipping away at coding tasks or server maintainence while I'm AFK or in transit. NixOS is the key to all of this, since agents can interact see the whole server config, make changes and run compile-time checks before actually deploying. It also means that even if they do mess up I can always revert.
- zrail 2mo ago
  Out of curiosity, do you use the pi-xmpp[1] extension or do you have your own? [1]: https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp
  - pavo-etc 2mo ago
    Initially I was using that extension but I ran into its limitations pretty quickly. Sometimes the agent wouldn't reply over XMPP, it didn't have any support for typing indicators or status messages, and it had no way to support inter-agent communication, the agent could only ever speak to the configured owner account. I also had no way of running system commands like /new over XMPP. The headless pi + xmpp wrapper ended up working much better because the XMPP bridge is the only interface and I get full control over its capabilities. This is my wrapper: https://github.com/zachpmanson/pi-msg https://github.com/zachpmanson/pi-msg
    - zrail 2mo ago
      Thanks!
hakunin 2mo ago
I often find it reductive when people say "just tell Pi to build you an extension". Having used it as my one and only harness for a few months now, it's easy to get an extension, but hard to get a good one, that actually works well and helps. My advice: focus on getting work done and slowly adapt Pi with small augmentations as you go. You can start getting work done on vanilla setup. When the right idea comes along, try it. Be ready to refine it, and most importantly, rollback the addition. I've rolled back a bunch. Many "batteries" that are "included" come from speculative and half-baked ideas, from people who were excited about something at some point in their journey. In practice, those ideas may not bring the desired results, and their creator may've moved on already. So it's better to either learn very well established tools, or mold your own slowly. For example, many automatic memory systems are not helpful. I built a small extension that asked me whether it should remember something (and write it down to a properly scoped SKILL or AGENTS file). Turned out I accepted less than 5% of suggestions. Most were useless one-offs that would pollute the context. Can't imagine how much crap would accumulate if I wasn't in the loop.
- suprjami 2mo ago
  I have the same opinion as your first paragraph, but I don't want to spend weeks or months vibe-coding basic features which come built into almost every other agent. Yeah maybe Claude/OpenCode/KiloCode/Hermes/whatever are not as minimal as Pi but they also work right now.
  - hakunin 2mo ago
    We probably differ a lot in what we consider "basic". Are subagents basic? I found them only useful in very few situations. Is LSP support basic? There are mixed results on whether it helps or hurts. Are multiple choice asking tools basic? I found that they add extra unnecessary ceremony, eat extra context, and I almost never answer with one of the choices exactly. And if you try vanilla Pi, you will also find out that it works right now.
    - throw10920 2mo ago
      > Are subagents basic? I found them only useful in very few situations. I've found them to be extraordinarily helpful, because they allow me to much more carefully control context and reduce token spend by using a smart model for the parent agent and cheap models for the subagents. Do you just have a big token budget?
Onavo 2mo ago
The biggest issue with Pi is that they don't have proper sandboxing with auto approval. Most solutions are third party and half baked. You have to either choose between just auto approval (no sandboxing), or a Claude/Codex style sandbox but manual approval.
- pavo-etc 2mo ago
  The secret here is giving pi its own user account on your machine, using Unix permissions.
  - Onavo 2mo ago
    It doesn't do auto approval.
- spudlyo 2mo ago
  I started treating my developer workstations like cattle. With a press of a button I can turn a vanilla Ubuntu 22.04.04 server install into my happy-place developer environment. Tools, code, browser -- everything set up exactly the way I want it. I have it synced to a couple of different laptops, and a separate boot drive from my desktop machine. It has a restricted set of SSH keys, and I push code to a separate upstream. If YOLO MODE causes pi to destroy my workstation (it hasn't yet) I'll just nuke the thing from orbit and spin up a new one.
- josh_p 2mo ago
  This is also by design. Pi assumes you’re a power user and you know what you you’re doing and what you want. If sandboxing and the security that Claude and codex offer is something you truly need, pi might not be for you and that’s okay.
  - imtringued 2mo ago
    This is backwards. If you're a power user you want full control over all the tools granted to the agent and not let the agent bypass them by using bash. It's the people who don't want to customize anything that don't care about letting the agent go haywire and just run whatever bash commands it needs in a sandbox. Think about why a sandbox is needed: Your permissions have been too loose. You now need to deal with the fallout of your decision externally. If all the agent was allowed to do is read your files and run cargo test, you wouldn't need a sandbox at all, the agent is the sandbox. Now you might say, but what if it needs to modify files? If you wanted to build a sandbox or approval workflow here, you'd put it right into your custom write tool. It could be an extension you just download so you can pick your favorite write tool. Instead, the authors of pi.dev chose the worst possible defaults.
unknownfuture 2mo ago
Honestly I think the thing I love most about Pi is that I'm not dealing with a tool with a thousand undiscovered features. I either pick and install what I want from the package ecosystem or I bottle up my own workflows into extensions as I find what works best for me. The result is that the tool gradually morphs into the thing I need rather than me having to adapt myself to whatever new thing Anthropic or OpenAI comes up with. I can also feel confident that the thing it becomes is what I actually need and not what maximizes token usage...
pornel 2mo ago
I'm enjoying the maximal version: https://omp.sh https://omp.sh
- frogperson 2mo ago
  OMP is great. I pair it with https://nono.sh/ https://nono.sh/ and sleep alot easier at night.
- alasano 2mo ago
  I find omp funny because it's the opposite of why Iike Pi.
  - JSR_FDED 2mo ago
    It’s more like a curated config. Like using Astro or Lunar instead of starting with a plain Neovim and crafting your own configuration.
    - jeremyjh 2mo ago
      It goes further than that. I mean, it has a bash interpreter natively linked into it.
  - WinstonSmith84 2mo ago
    it depends on how you see things. By default OMP with all its options turned off is very much like Pi, just with a better UX/UI - and - a faster start, somehow. And you can turn things on when needed. I see people like Pi because it's super skinny and they can tweak it with extensions A, B or C. I like OMP because I don't have to spend time figuring out the next best thing while there is a guy out there who knows (more than me) what he is doing and packaging all the good stuff into his app. Yes it's opinionated, but I use regularly half of the installed extensions - and occasionally play with other features too. But I can agree on a thing: the best for OMP would be to have a clear "list of extensions" that can be activated or deactivated (to unclutter the menus)
- LaurensBER 2mo ago
esafak 2mo ago
I use pi for agentic CI; reviews, etc.
- klooney 2mo ago
  It's so easy- npm install, a little markdown boot camp, and you get great results.
swingboy 2mo ago
Aside from the minimal system prompt, how does it handle context better than other agents? It still has to send the system prompt (which includes AGENTS.md and skill definitions) along with the full conversation every request, no?
- TheRoque 2mo ago
  A lot of harnesses compress the context when it becomes massive, Pi doesn't do that out of the box (EDIT: that's wrong, as pointed out below). It can be both good and bad. Also since it doesn't have a lot of tools out of the box, the context is not polluted with external tool call descriptions that the agent has to be aware of. Basically, it doesn't handle the context "better", it barely does anything special to it, which can actually be better for cost efficiency.
  - the_duke 2mo ago
    That's not true, pi auto-compacts when getting close to the context window limit?
  - rahimnathwani 2mo ago
    Pi has auto compaction enabled by default: https://pi.dev/docs/latest/compaction https://pi.dev/docs/latest/compaction
    - TheRoque 2mo ago
      Ok my bad. I remember hearing that it was a criticism of common harnesses and that the creator of Pi wanted more control over that feature, so I assumed it wasn't enabled by default. Thank for pointing it out !
      - rahimnathwani 2mo ago
        It was introduced in late 2025: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/92 https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/92
jauntywundrkind 2mo ago
i really hope OpenCode v2 with the Effect internals can ascertain and realize and lock on to being the best extensibility platform, on to having a core that serves not just itself, it's conceits of/as product, but a wider world. a street that wants to "find it's own uses for things". it feels like there's still a strong layer of "for us" vs "for you" within opencode, that i hope, over time can get chewed away at. plugins to rebuild history, to re-title are just impossible, for example. none of these changes, these freedoms are hard to release. the patches i juggle are easy. but whether or not my agentic software serves as a substrate for my desire, or whether it allows me to augment agency: tis the question. Dax (opencode lead) has such humble takes, is so forthwith about trying failing trying again on and on. about iterative improvement. and it feels like the guts are so in line to deliver, to allow such freedom now in OpenCode. but i don't see the product (anti-product) alignment, where opencode understands that it's competition isn't cc or codex, which can't and won't ever really compete, but pi, that the competition is to be the putty, to deliver the agency, to be a substrate. really hoping, because i love opencode, and these internals in v2 are sick. the "devtools must be open sourced" debate comes screaming into the fore on this. it certainly argues similar to the post here: that it is minimalism, it is adaptability, programmability, it is directability that unlocks and unleashes us: > Imagine the convoluted misery it would be trying to plug that into the VS Code extensions API! Or trying to get it into vimdiff. It would certainly be possible, but the machinery to start pre-processing the commits as soon as they appear would be nigh-on impossible. - https://blog.exe.dev/devtools-must-be-open-source https://blog.exe.dev/devtools-must-be-open-source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 i don't even fully agree! today more than ever, why not cut a VS Code extension? why not cut some wild coop.nvim async extension that runs whatever subprocesses, talks to whatever system daemon? dream it up and do it; the llm's will cut through the mechanicals. but the core point, about finding software that doesn't obstruct, that accelerates the human agency: it's so Douglas Engelbart. to Augment Agency is so close akin to Augment Intellect, the grand passion for human interest engagement envolvement constructivism fucking-around-and-finding-out. and my how unhindered we can be now. if only our tools/systems/softwares let us be. here's to you, soft software!
Yiling-J 2mo ago
Pi is really good. For people who want to build their own agent with even more minimal and extensible, the underlying agent harness is also worth looking: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/agent/src/harness https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/agen...
langs 2mo ago
Pi’s minimalism reveals a simple truth: the LLM is the core of any agent harness. Consequently, much of current harness tuning will become redundant(or even a hindrance) with next-gen models.
- prettyblocks 2mo ago
  I always thought that the frontier coding models were specifically trained to perform well in the harness from their providers. I imagine this will always be the case to some extent.
  - zahrevsky 2mo ago
    Yes, and the article makes the point that this might be changing.
  - tudelo 2mo ago
    From what I understand pre-training is totally irrelevant to this and as far as post training goes there will be multiple steps, for claude and codex and the like that ship with a harness, the harness is definitely included in evaluation. However, they will definitely include evaluation from a variety or even none, and settle on something that works the "best" for a release. Disclaimer: No first hand knowledge
  - strobe 2mo ago
    even if they are is no guarantee that for 'your' specific tasks is beneficial in any means
yogthos 2mo ago
I found the nice part of Pi was the plugin system and the ability to hook into any part of the agentic loop. But minimalism is a net negative in my experience. What you really want is a harness that meets the expectations of the model and steers it in the right direction. There are also a ton of small mechanical things a harness can handle that make the whole process much smoother. A really simple example is auto balancing parens. Even frontier models like Claude still struggle with this. Often the model will end up writing a python script to figure out where the mismatch is, and then generate a new version of the code. All of that simply wastes tokens and eats up context on a task that could've been accomplished completely mechanically. The approach I took with dirge, is to put the model in a loop where it has clearly defined tasks, and the harness handles any repairs that can be done automatically. And I used Janet to provide a plugin system based on what Pi is doing. You get a batteries included experience out of the box, and you can customize it to fit a specific project using plugins if needed. https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-06-08-dirge-code.html https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-06-08-dirge-code.html
orliesaurus 2mo ago
If someone has never used Pi, what's a good starting point where someone took Pi and started adding some extensions etc to get to that minimal-but-useful-and-productive-for-coding state? Is there such recipe/writeup?
- kadoban 2mo ago
  You can just fire it up and ask it to suggest some, or look on the site at the most downloaded and see which sound useful to you. That's basically what I did. I also put in some work to containerize it and do some manual/automatic checks to lock down extensions a bit, but that's just me. It really doesn't take much for it to be useful, maybe something to search the web? If you want you can just tell it to write you extensions too, like one to wrap curl so it can get to the web easier for instance. Or just tell it to use curl, really up to you. Just an example to point out: like, do whatever, it's very flexible.
- ssivark 2mo ago
  It's already in that minimal but useful state so you can just start and ask it to write code. If you want a more tricked out "starter pack" there's oh-my-pi or lazypi and maybe a few others. But worth being careful what you install because 1. A full pack of extensions can destroy the minimalism of pi 2. Random extentions are a security nightmare.
- rahimnathwani 2mo ago
  Mario recommends you don't do that. You could try ohmypi but it sort of misses the point. Why not just install nicopreme's pi-subagents and pi-web-access and then install whatever else you need when you find it's missing?
- schneehertz 2mo ago
  Just install Pi and start using it directly, no extensions needed for Pi to get the job done. Only when you genuinely find a feature is missing should you write one yourself or have Pi write an extension or skill for you. Don't use extensions written by others, after all, those extensions were also vibe-coded.
- 2mo ago
tosh 2mo ago
i also found re context window: less is more at least with GPT 5.6 Sol fwiw https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ sh is all you need
- sebmellen 2mo ago
  Do you use smol? How do you find it compares to other harnesses for things like MCP connections? I’m tempted to use it since I’m a fan of the philosophy.
  - tosh 2mo ago
    I use it for smaller changes (no compaction yet) If I have agents.md or other context I want it to read I mention it at the beginning of the session re MCP: I am not using an MCP with smol but there are ways to convert MCPs into CLI tools or typed js I imagine that would work well/more token efficient with smol (or most harnesses actually) The best thing I found so far re smol is that it fits into the context window with plenty of room to spare So it is easy to adapt (and add stuff to it, even stuff you only need specifically for just 1 project) Whereas adapting a more complex harness is more error prone
    - sebmellen 2mo ago
      I didn't realize you were the author. Super cool! I'll be trying it out. I do like the grug-brain approach of keeping things extremely simple and easy to reason about. One thing that I don't like about Pi is that it's almost too extensible, in the sense that I can add a lot of shit into it without really understanding what a given extension is doing. And both from a security and token efficiency standpoint, I like the premise of converting things like MCPs into CLIs. It might be worth investing in tooling that works nicely with the agent harness, but that is not directly integrated with it. I'd be glad to work on that for smol if I can get a workflow going.
      - tosh 2mo ago
        I'm glad there are quite a few good open source ones by now. Also happy with how much love codex gets from OpenAI. That said: I was looking at existing agents to find one to build upon and to me they were all too complex and were leaning too heavily into 3rd party dependencies. Nothing I could understand comfortably in an afternoon (that's also on me I guess). Pi was closest to what I was looking for but still too big and too modular. (It's hard to come up with good abstractions that work well across all major models + keep up with new concepts that come and go all the time with new releases.) The more complex agents err on the side of supporting many models 'ok' instead of focusing on taking advantage of a specific model. With a tiny implementation it is easier to adapt it. Adding new stuff, removing stuff again, changing it from working well specifically with GPT 5.6 Sol to working with the exact model I want.
astrobiased 2mo ago
Pi does one thing that I love, developing a tool that has minimalism where it's easily configurable with good documentation. The leads to new use cases that the the author(s) would have never dreamed of. The organic growth process of the Pi ecosystem has been fascinating to observe. It's one of the reasons why Pi has become one of my favorite coding agents to this day, flexible beyond personal uses and extensible to larger environments. IMO, I view it more than a coding agent, it's a coding agent platform with powerful extensibility.
para_parolu 2mo ago
Pi is awesome. I built whole agentic ide on top of pi and obsidian. The fact that I can modify it easily makes a difference
mw888 2mo ago
I like Pi, but I didn't end up using it. I tried OpenCode, Pi, Zed Editor and some NVIM packages. I wanted open source, featureful and easy to use. Specifically I wanted to easily edit the agent prompt. I ended up on VS Code. I'm very critical of Microsoft generally, but VS Code is a very good editor and my favorite agent harness. For headless, Pi might be the way.
imagetic 2mo ago
+1 #teampi
ironfootnz 2mo ago
I think for indie hackers and people that build their own stack is great, but real scenario and people with money Enterprise likes the idea of batteries included. I found this one a little bit better and they do support Extensions like Pi. But comes with all features like codex, claude code and it's open-source. https://github.com/autohandai/code-cli https://github.com/autohandai/code-cli
- jbs789 2mo ago
  What it hints at is the direction of model agnostic and custom agents. I could see companies using Pi to create a product for orgs, for example. Low cost and closer to the customer needs than a general harness.
  - alansaber 2mo ago
    This is the new enterprise trend (RAG? no, we need our own pi plugin/adaptation).
    - jbs789 2mo ago
      It’s interesting. Many ways these things will be optimised. Just at the beginning !
r0b05 2mo ago
I love using Pi and its design philosophy. The minimalism is what resonates with me. It just works, update after update.
manoji 2mo ago
I love Pi . I have been building an agent using its agent harness https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/agent https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/agen... . I love the simplicity .
mraza007 2mo ago
Pi Agent has been one of my favorite harness when it comes to using with local models I had a lot of success running it on my Mac with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model
- mark_l_watson 2mo ago
  Same experience, sometimes using Little Coder helps make things faster because it is built on pi and strips out some functionality. Probably best to stick with pi however, adding pi-sandbox for some security. I will only run Little Coder in an Apple Container.
  - mraza007 2mo ago
    Haven’t heard about little corer but I’ll give it a try
eclipxe 2mo ago
I built Fusion (software factory) on top of Pi and have been thrilled with it https://github.com/Runfusion/Fusion https://github.com/Runfusion/Fusion
1saadcodes 2mo ago
This seems like a more natural use of agents than asking them to one shot and push to prod. Give them a measurable objective, let them experiment, and judge the outcome instead of the implementation. Similar to how you would deal with a junior or intern basically
grewil2 2mo ago
Are all of you pi users paying Anthropic and OpenAI for API usage? Or can you combine pi with a subscription? So far API usage is a lot more expensive than subscription and if you need better models than Deepseek and Kimi, and you are not wealthy, I don’t see a way around this.
- danslo 2mo ago
  You can use both providers in Pi using subscriptions. Be careful with Anthropic though, it’s against their TOS.
  - thehours 2mo ago
    Doesn’t using the Anthropic subscription this way get charged as extra usage, and thus effectively billed at API rates?
    - danslo 2mo ago
      Oh, I stand corrected. It's been a while since I've used their models. Glad we can still use OpenAI subscription through Pi.
    - colinmarc 2mo ago
      I use my Anthropic subscription with Pi. I thought they would start charging me API usage at some point, but it never happened. (If it did happen, I would switch to open weights models.)
      - colinmarc 2mo ago
        ...funnily enough, a few hours after posting this, it stopped working.
    - thepasch 2mo ago
      Not if you run your own system prompt that does not explicitly contain the term "pi coding agent". Perhaps they string-match against some other stuff, too, but as long as you paraphrase the system prompt a bit, you should be fine.
jedisct1 2mo ago
https://swival.dev https://swival.dev remains my favorite agent for local models.
kamikazechaser 2mo ago
If using outside of subscriptions, It is almost a no brainer to use this simple because of the efficiency. With subscriptions, not so good. Even the officially endorsed OpenAI integration lacks support for server-side context compaction (without a separate plugin which still triggers the pi native compaction).
- rcarmo 2mo ago
  I added that in https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw a few weeks back. The reason it’s not in pi-ai is that server-side OpenAI compaction is encrypted/opaque and (at least in my experience) can cause issues when switching models.
genericacct 2mo ago
Only thing that runs easily on termux now that gemini-cli has been discontinued..
yawpitch 2mo ago
But wouldn’t Tau be twice as good as Pi?
- rcarmo 2mo ago
  It already is, to the point I’ve forked it https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/tau-prime https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/tau-prime and am playing with bolting on my “standard” web UI onto it.
whazor 2mo ago
Both Codex and Claude have trained their models to their harnesses. There are some experimentations by Igor Warzocha to extract Codex shapes and put it in Pi: https://github.com/IgorWarzocha/howaboua-pi-stuff/tree/main/packages/pi-codex-conversion https://github.com/IgorWarzocha/howaboua-pi-stuff/tree/main/... I'm expecting every model will have a fine tuned Pi extension at some point.
- rcarmo 2mo ago
  I’ve been using both families of models inside pi/piclaw (https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/ https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/) and I assure you they work _better_ in that environment than in the originals. The models are not trained to the harnesses, the harnesses provide cues that the models follow.
  - whazor 2mo ago
    You can see the approach in his post: https://howaboua.dev/writing/how-i-gave-pi-17-tools-without-loading-17-schemas/ https://howaboua.dev/writing/how-i-gave-pi-17-tools-without-... The result: 38% fewer startup tokens, 17 tools exposed through just three schemas, and 19 skills loaded only when needed.
    - n6242 2mo ago
      The changing header is really distracting when trying to read your blog. Then it followed me when I scrolled and I just gave up.
      - whazor 2mo ago
        Not my blog :)
    - rcarmo 2mo ago
      It's pretty much what I do as well, piclaw has had selective tool activation since... March, I think.
- 2mo ago
pixlmint 2mo ago
that website is horrendous to look at on an eink display btw
carlsborg 2mo ago
They removed ~80% of Claude Code’s system prompt for Claude 5 models so the harness cost-per-task benchmark could be stale.
rcarmo 2mo ago
I built https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/ https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/ on top of pi largely leveraging its extension philosophy (I extended the contract to UI extensions, basically) and am very happy with the results. Even though I added a few more tools, the core agent is wonderful.
paldepind2 2mo ago
Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion. Given all the hype, I was a bit underwhelmed by Pi. It definitely has some good ideas around customization, but it annoyed me in many little ways. For a program that's minimal it sure takes a long time to start up, the standard C-p and C-n bindings don't work, it doesn't follow the XDG Base Directory Specification and just pollutes my $HOME directory. I think there's still space for another harness that's 1/ open-source, 2/ written in a fast compiled language (Rust, Go, etc.) and scriptable in a simple (aka non-JS) scripting language (Lua, etc.), 3/ less opinionated and more sensible so things like XDG isn't a WONTFIX.
- intothemild 2mo ago
  I really really like pi. But I agree with you, it's biggest weakness is that for a real long time the tagline of it was "there are many harnesses, this one is MINE" (That being Mario's) I have a lot of respect for Mario and his team, but there's things like you've pointed out that deviate from standards, and other issues that I've seen get posted, only to get knocked down by the team as WON'T FIX because, even though the new owners changed the tagline from MINE to YOURS... It's still very much Mario's. I do like opinionated things. Truly. But I'm also of the opinion that standards exist for a reason. That said. I like Pi so much that it's my daily driver, and I've created an ecosystem of plugins to do everything I want, having them all tie together and communicate through the shared bus. Pi is really a good harness. It's just, well. I don't agree with some of the opinions. If I'm going to add another thing here... Whilst you cannot get everything you need from the openAI API spec, you can get a surprising amount to get a model config. That said. Versions of Pi are still shipping with model configs for certain inference providers. I do hope that gets decoupled at some stage. I see the groundwork being laid. So the work is being done in the right direction. I applaud the team but I do get the feeling that a lot of this is because people want to contribute, but the team really wants to hand craft this. And that's great
  - bacteria 2mo ago
    Could you share some of the ecosystem/plugins/workflows you're using with Pi?
kriro 2mo ago
Philosophically, pi.dev is exactly what I'm looking for. Minimalist and explicit (YOLO by default, we know it can be trouble but we tell you so). Anyone here using the Rust rewrite of pi.dev as their daily driver? It's endorsed by the author of pi.dev and looks pretty attractive to me being both minimalist and not having npm attached. Any info "from the trenches" are appreciated (setup with sandboxing, extra niceties etc).
- badlogic 2mo ago
  i don't remember endorsing any rust rewrite of pi.
  - kriro 2mo ago
    Ok, I'm a dummy: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust "pi_agent_rust is a from-scratch Rust port of Pi Agent by Mario Zechner (made with his blessing!)." It's pi, not pi.dev
efilife 2mo ago
And I thought that this was going to be about the number PI
mft_ 2mo ago
I’m going to go against the grain and say that Pi is a little too minimal by default. The emacs comparison is interesting, but default Pi is like emacs that can load files but you’ve got to extend it manually to save or search within a file. I’d argue that there’s a minimal set of functions that a coding harness needs to just enable a model to get stuff done, and they shouldn’t be an extra effort to set up. (Oh-my-pi exists for those of a similar persuasion.)
- v3gas 2mo ago
  What is that set of functions for you?
  - mft_ 2mo ago
    I can't offer a definitive list. But some/all of web access, web search, sub-agents, plan, goals, looping, and maybe a to-do list. I'd suggest the default should be anything that makes the model more efficient or effective to a reasonable current level.
    - newtwilly 2mo ago
      I disagree on plan and todo-list, which seem relatively not needed to me. No comment on goals/looping, which I don't have much experience with. To me it's great how minimal the system prompt and tool set is, and I doubt those features are worth the tokens for every model. (Who knows if they improve performance for SOTA models, and they probably harm performance for small local models.) I would add "better sandbox" support, which I think should be included out of the box. Not having a very simple way to get out of "yolo" mode is kinda crazy. Sure, there are plugins, but they do have some issues. pi-bash-approval is good, but manual approval plus allowlist is a "bad" way to run coding agents. The "best" way in my current opinion, is where commands run by default in a sandbox, but commands can be ran unsandboxed as needed, requiring approval or allow-list in that case. Cursor was pretty good at this (when I used it). For example I don't want to configure my sandbox with access to docker, which would present easy jailbreaks, but I do want to allowlist certain docker commands or approve them to run on my host as needed. pi-sandbox is good at allowing me to configure sandbox access, but this feature where somethings can run unsandboxed is missing. I write more about this and about (hacky, but productive enough) workaround here: https://github.com/carderne/pi-sandbox/issues/50 https://github.com/carderne/pi-sandbox/issues/50
JonasHB97 2mo ago
We are just moving towards simpler an simpler agent setups. The harness moat will dissapear
nylonstrung 2mo ago
Unrelated to Pi (which is great) can we please stop using LoTR names for companies. The Peter Thiel glazing/cargo culting is pretty cringe at this point
- 627467 2mo ago
  Example of how easily humans are biased by the bubble they live in and start projecting assumptions everywhere (seemingly against their own interest). Please provide evidence of relationship of pi/earendil to peter thiel. I also suggest that if you believe peter thiel relationship with anything is a nuisance then - maybe - try avoiding gut-assigning links of anything in the world to him. you maybe see things in more positive light and it would be fairer to those things. Peter thiel doesnt own tolkien work. The world is bigger than one mans bias
- jmuguy 2mo ago
  To paraphrase Office Space - Why should we change names? He's the one who sucks.
pmilanez 2mo ago
Is there any good benchmarks for coding harness? In terms of tokens consumption, Pi is awesome..local model etc. But regarding coding quality, task completion, over engineering, all related to the final result that the LLM is delivering trough the harness, is there any benchmark that shows the ups and downs of each one? I'm struggling rotating harness because of a lack os a way to truly compared what is good or not.
- tosh 2mo ago
  it's very difficult and time-consuming to make good comparisons (especially for open ended tasks) also because there are so many configuration options - which env do you provide? - which model(s)? - subagents? - system prompt (default or custom?)? - agents.md etc etc also you kinda have to look at many runs and study their traces, if you look at too few runs the outcome variability you're drawing from is too high
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Feels like a problem where you have to quantify/test for your own use-case. Otherwise just go by the generic SWE-bench scores etc.
- easymuffin 2mo ago
  One recent example but also quite specific to Kimi K3 can be found here https://xcancel.com/composio/status/2083161873357111297 https://xcancel.com/composio/status/2083161873357111297
senko 2mo ago
Meta: this reads like a corporate article, info-selling a solution to enterprises. The style is a far cry from anything Mario or Armin usually write. First indication of business strategy around Pi's reverse acquisition of Earendil, perhaps?
- sunaookami 2mo ago
  The first indication was them adding telemetry to Pi right after the acquisition.
nicman23 2mo ago
name your product pi become ~~ungovernable~~ ungooglable
rbanffy 2mo ago
We are having a problem with namespace collisions. I really thought this was related to the Raspberry Pi (which is a very minimalist computer). Earlier today, I saw something about a Rio terminal and thought about Plan9.
ljosifov 2mo ago
Love pi. It's good to have a minimal agent, always welcome. Even if only to bootstrap install other agents. E.g. recently Hermes stopped installing under Termux (v0.19 - no, v0.18 - yes). Agent pi to the rescue: installed it under Termux (Android), started it, pointed pi to the Hermes github, asked for v0.18 specifically - and it did it. Cherry on the top - asked it to install a plugin from github I use (unmerged PR), did that too. Even if nowadays for coding I mostly use OMP (the pi with wheels and bells and whistles). For general computer use mostly use Hermes. Model-tied harnesses have their place e.g. Codex for me. I never know if it's allowed or banned using the sub from non-Codex harness - so stick with it. Even if only to have the 'canonical reference setup' to compare with and measure against.
ncrmro 2mo ago
We’ve been building atop the .agents standard and have written some tools around this under the ai-outfitter org few interesting repos. - outfitter compose different agent profile w, eg skills, mcp, context and wrap pi,Claude,codex - agent-operator run these agents into kubernetes - actions run pi during investigations on failed ci or weekly updates - channels give pi agents an inbox for slack/email/websocket access, calendar wake ups - deepwork build long running workflows with verification gates The best example of different profiles is having a prod/nonprod bot that has grafana mcp for incident investigation
archargelod 2mo ago
Sorry for negativity, but it wouldn't hurt to put some qualifier in the title, like, "Pi agent". So people, not interested in that theme can avoid your article. Thank you. I was expecting an article about Pi constant or maybe raspberry Pi computer. "My Disappointment Is Immeasurable And My Day Is Ruined!"
- TacticalCoder 2mo ago
  I'm very excited about pi.dev but naming it Pi when there are people like me who've got seven Raspberry Pi around is just... Confusing. To me there's pi, the constant. Then there's "a pi": a Raspberry Pi. Now there's "pi, the agent" too. It gets confusing. Especially if you use pi on a Pi to write code that uses pi.
- toephu2 2mo ago
  When I first heard about pi.dev I was also initially confused. Raspberry Pi is already very big in the hacker community... they really should not have named this harness "Pi".
vinhnx 2mo ago
Small model-facing surface, more responsibility in the harness. I'm exploring that tradeoff in Rust with VT Code: https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode
mark_l_watson 2mo ago
I am starting to share the opinion in the article. I used to use Claude Code with strong open models, and sometimes pay for Opus. Now one of my main drivers is out of the box pi’s 4 built in tools, and I add just two extra tools: pi-sandbox and a paid for search service tool. This setup works great with the latest deepseek v4 flash, switching to more powerful open models occasionally. I wrote my own coding harness in Common Lisp that is almost free or 3rd party libraries and I basically copied pi + the 6 tools I use for pi (except I have two search tools using different vendors in my Common Lisp code). Everyone (and every company?) should run their own tests and experiments. I find it sad when I talk with people who default to the most complex and the most expensive tools without even trying to evaluate alternatives.
vcfgdev 2mo ago
I really like Pi and have recommended it to many people. It has been my daily driver for months and really changed my perspective on how to design tools. The `bash` tool is magic.
lukelabs 2mo ago
[flagged]
surgical_fire 2mo ago
I recently moved entirely to Pi, and I am really enjoying the journey so far. I am slowly shaping it to the way I like to work. It's a bit of a bumpy start, but there are two benefits I see from it: First is that you get to understand better what goes on behind the scenes. Since it is minimalistic, you have to think about your workflow, about what you want your agents to do, how you want them to do it, etc. It's a completely different way to work since tools like ClaudeCode do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes and just force on you their established way of doing things. By adding the building blocks yourself, you end up with a better understanding (and in many ways, control) of what is happening there. Second, I adore how I can juggle sessions in Pi. /tree, /clone and /name quickly became second nature for me to manage agents. I am totally abusing prompt templates in my development workflows. Also, it is an awesome harness for the models I use. DS and MiMo feel very snappy now, especially after I started to adapt Pi to my way of working. Lastly, even though those models are already cheap even on Claude Code, it feels like it is even cheaper now.
0xdeadbeefbabe 2mo ago
It would be funny if suckless.org had a harness.
sage981 2mo ago
Under 1,000 tokens for the system prompt and tool defs is the number that matters here. Everything else is downstream of not crowding the context.
jsw97 2mo ago
A fundamental limitation of third-party harnesses is that they can't see all the data. As earendil pointed out, providers are now moving to encrypted thinking blocks. As an example, this could affect compaction. If pi calls another agent to do the compacting, that agent can't read the encrypted thinking blocks. In contrast, if codex calls another openai-codex agent to do the compaction, they can feed that agent the thinking blocks. In theory, this additional information could be useful to the compacting agent. In practice, I don't think it helps too much right now. But I could see ways for providers to exploit this to drive a bigger wedge between their harnesses and pi.
- troyvit 2mo ago
  This is interesting because of just how old-school SaaS it is. They're using old modes to build a wider moat around their product, hoping that it will keep their customers within it. The AI boom feels different from the SaaS boom though because of all the different flavors of open that are available to people right now, from self-hosting your own stuff if you're a rich tinkerer to hooking up to OpenRouter or another service and getting your pick of models. I feel like some of the biggest providers are going to find themselves on the wrong side of the moat because, despite being massive innovators in their field they're monetizing it like they did in 2014.
monkeydust 2mo ago
I do think that the value of these harnesses is inverse to the abilities of the frontier models - meaning - that as the models get smarter (by whatever benchmark you want to use) the harness matters less - it becomes more around context i.e. data.
toephu2 2mo ago
re: overloaded naming Anyone else think "Pi" was a bad naming choice? raspberry pi was already big in the hacker community
browningstreet 2mo ago
I think banging on the "pi minimalism" thing is already old. Pi needs to have another dagger in its cachet. And frankly, I'm already tired of fighting Claude's lack of proper memory. So I guess I'm not-minimalism, but does that make me a maximalist? I'm getting more development done with opencode, orca, and hermes. I do care about the harness though, as it extracts more juice from the rock model.

551 points by luispa 2mo ago

I love hacking away at pi extensions. I realised how use case dependent harness behaviour is when I tried to use my customised-for-a-side-project pi config at work and realised I needed to tweak it significantly to be useful - I would not be surprised if tools like Claude Code needing to be all things for all people is hurting their peak usefulness.

CharlieDigital 2mo ago
End up building Pi extensions instead of actual product. Doesn't make sense to me, but to each their own.
- impulser_ 2mo ago
  Yeah, but the future will essentially be building extensions for agents. Agents will become the new web browser and extensions will be the new apps. We are already seeing the early stages of this.
  - CharlieDigital 2mo ago
    how many extensions do you need for browsing the web? Adblocker. Not much else because the browser already does the important work. Same with any of the off the shelf harnesses. Go build something useful instead of tweaking the minutiae of the harness.
    - impulser_ 2mo ago
      You don't need any extensions to use Pi. You can get far without any.
- jmuguy 2mo ago
  Yeah this seems pretty strange to me, I feel like I don't really care about messing around with all the tooling surrounding AI. I just want to get my actual work done. When I first moved to VS Code from Sublime Text I think I spent maybe 15 minutes setting up a few extensions like Emmet and then never really thought about it again - because I had actual work to do. I've just been waiting for all the constant change around AI coding to die down, assuming whatever is best will emerge and then I'll just use that.

malisper 2mo ago

Having tried all the coding harnesses, I find that using Pi is exactly like using Emacs. For anything you want to build you can ask your agent and it will build it. There's tons of existing code to help you configure it. At the same time half the code is buggy, UI elements will try to overlap one another, and you'll periodically get crashes. If you're willing to put in the work to master the learning curve and push through the issues, it can be a great tool: https://i.sstatic.net/7Cu9Z.jpg https://i.sstatic.net/7Cu9Z.jpg

azuanrb 2mo ago
Never learned Emacs but am a Neovim user. But similar to what I said to my colleagues as well. Codex, Claude Code are VS Code, Jetbrain. Pi is Neovim.
- dasil003 2mo ago
  It's funny you say this, because as someone that rejected emacs (default editor was XEmacs on the Sun machines in my 90s CS computer lab) in favor of vim early. I think a big part of the appeal of vim for me is that it's a great editor just based on the defaults. Sure you can configure it but you don't need to. Emacs strength is customization, and that's what Pi feels like compared to batteries-included harnesses. I understand both world views and both are legitimate. But I do feel like LLMs are advancing so quickly that it's not a good use of my time to optimize harnesses at this point. I have actual work to do, so sharpening my tools needs to be selective and time-boxed. Personally I'm staying agnostic on harness, not locking into Codex or Claude Code, but also not prematurely optimizing things that tens of thousands of other tools-focused developers are going deep on across the ecosystem. My goal is not to be an early adopter but to reap the benefits of all that experimentation.
- MattPerry 2mo ago
  I agree. Pi is more like NeoVim if we have to map to Vim/Emacs. Emacs is full (at least compared to Vim) of the hidden features you didn't know it had installed. Pi doesn't bundle any hidden features. A bog standard GNU Emacs install contains, what, like ~10 games, a mail reader, a web browser, RSS feed reader, a nd a Morse code decipher? Even more so, Pi even has opinionated forks and "distributions" like oh-my-pi that are like LazyVim/AstroVim.

behnamoh 2mo ago

Literally every AI project ends up getting monetized even (read: especially) if it starts as open source. It's only a matter of time before π's enshittification kicks in.

nrb 2mo ago
Why is this relevant though? This project is so minimal that forking it at any point since it started “mainstreaming” and implementing any functionality that came after would have been utterly trivial.
unknownfuture 2mo ago
Eh, it's open source. If its closed, fork it, move on. It's entire raison d'etre is to have a very minimal core so it's nature is that the base product isn't actually where the magic exists, but in the extensibility and the ecosystem. It'd be very tough to close that back down now that it's open.
josh_p 2mo ago
Mario talked about the Earendil transition in his blog post here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/ Him and Armin especially, have been involved in OSS for years and have worked hard to build communities around projects they’ve built and maintained. We’ve all seen enough projects become what you’re afraid of, Mario included. I’m optimistic that they’ll keep true to their goal of keeping pi open while building their other products around it. I think they understand the community dynamics necessary to keep a project like pi going. And they want it to succeed that way.

peterldowns 2mo ago

We built our first version of our in-app agent with opencode, but we're probably going to switch to Pi. Fundamentally, Pi is the shape of the thing that should exist, and it's awesome to see that it works. Very satisfying to my engineering brain. Been having fun with ohmypi as my personal harness, but going to switch over to pi soon and just mess around with it until it works the way I want. The idea of completely personalized software is so cool and now that it's finally possible I am having so much fun.

zahrevsky 2mo ago
Haven't heard of ohmypi, thanks! I feel like this is a good starting point for someone like me who is not ready to configure a harness from zero right now.
- catlover76 2mo ago
  [dead]

codemog 2mo ago

Pi has the best code out of all coding agents. The only problem is it’s not as fully featured and some of its modules should be factored out into their own code base.

pavo-etc 2mo ago

I've had a lot of success running Pi on my server in headless mode and wrapping it in an XMPP client. This means I can talk to it wherever I can access XMPP (everywhere). It also mean agents can talk to each other when they need to. They've got a shared wiki they interact with and github issues as their todo list. I am running several named pi instances in parallel in their own user account on NixOS, so they can install whatever they want in ephemeral shells and I never need to worry about their env. The agents can spin up new enabled XMPP agents if I request it, though for now I've only needed a few since I'm not doing too much in parallel. My Pi is very vanilla, only my own XMPP wrapper and pi-subagents extension for anonymous subagents. Using it primarily with Deepseek v4 Flash for chipping away at coding tasks or server maintainence while I'm AFK or in transit. NixOS is the key to all of this, since agents can interact see the whole server config, make changes and run compile-time checks before actually deploying. It also means that even if they do mess up I can always revert.

zrail 2mo ago
Out of curiosity, do you use the pi-xmpp[1] extension or do you have your own? [1]: https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp
- pavo-etc 2mo ago
  Initially I was using that extension but I ran into its limitations pretty quickly. Sometimes the agent wouldn't reply over XMPP, it didn't have any support for typing indicators or status messages, and it had no way to support inter-agent communication, the agent could only ever speak to the configured owner account. I also had no way of running system commands like /new over XMPP. The headless pi + xmpp wrapper ended up working much better because the XMPP bridge is the only interface and I get full control over its capabilities. This is my wrapper: https://github.com/zachpmanson/pi-msg https://github.com/zachpmanson/pi-msg
  - zrail 2mo ago
    Thanks!

hakunin 2mo ago

I often find it reductive when people say "just tell Pi to build you an extension". Having used it as my one and only harness for a few months now, it's easy to get an extension, but hard to get a good one, that actually works well and helps. My advice: focus on getting work done and slowly adapt Pi with small augmentations as you go. You can start getting work done on vanilla setup. When the right idea comes along, try it. Be ready to refine it, and most importantly, rollback the addition. I've rolled back a bunch. Many "batteries" that are "included" come from speculative and half-baked ideas, from people who were excited about something at some point in their journey. In practice, those ideas may not bring the desired results, and their creator may've moved on already. So it's better to either learn very well established tools, or mold your own slowly. For example, many automatic memory systems are not helpful. I built a small extension that asked me whether it should remember something (and write it down to a properly scoped SKILL or AGENTS file). Turned out I accepted less than 5% of suggestions. Most were useless one-offs that would pollute the context. Can't imagine how much crap would accumulate if I wasn't in the loop.

suprjami 2mo ago
I have the same opinion as your first paragraph, but I don't want to spend weeks or months vibe-coding basic features which come built into almost every other agent. Yeah maybe Claude/OpenCode/KiloCode/Hermes/whatever are not as minimal as Pi but they also work right now.
- hakunin 2mo ago
  We probably differ a lot in what we consider "basic". Are subagents basic? I found them only useful in very few situations. Is LSP support basic? There are mixed results on whether it helps or hurts. Are multiple choice asking tools basic? I found that they add extra unnecessary ceremony, eat extra context, and I almost never answer with one of the choices exactly. And if you try vanilla Pi, you will also find out that it works right now.
  - throw10920 2mo ago
    > Are subagents basic? I found them only useful in very few situations. I've found them to be extraordinarily helpful, because they allow me to much more carefully control context and reduce token spend by using a smart model for the parent agent and cheap models for the subagents. Do you just have a big token budget?

Onavo 2mo ago

The biggest issue with Pi is that they don't have proper sandboxing with auto approval. Most solutions are third party and half baked. You have to either choose between just auto approval (no sandboxing), or a Claude/Codex style sandbox but manual approval.

pavo-etc 2mo ago
The secret here is giving pi its own user account on your machine, using Unix permissions.
- Onavo 2mo ago
  It doesn't do auto approval.
spudlyo 2mo ago
I started treating my developer workstations like cattle. With a press of a button I can turn a vanilla Ubuntu 22.04.04 server install into my happy-place developer environment. Tools, code, browser -- everything set up exactly the way I want it. I have it synced to a couple of different laptops, and a separate boot drive from my desktop machine. It has a restricted set of SSH keys, and I push code to a separate upstream. If YOLO MODE causes pi to destroy my workstation (it hasn't yet) I'll just nuke the thing from orbit and spin up a new one.
josh_p 2mo ago
This is also by design. Pi assumes you’re a power user and you know what you you’re doing and what you want. If sandboxing and the security that Claude and codex offer is something you truly need, pi might not be for you and that’s okay.
- imtringued 2mo ago
  This is backwards. If you're a power user you want full control over all the tools granted to the agent and not let the agent bypass them by using bash. It's the people who don't want to customize anything that don't care about letting the agent go haywire and just run whatever bash commands it needs in a sandbox. Think about why a sandbox is needed: Your permissions have been too loose. You now need to deal with the fallout of your decision externally. If all the agent was allowed to do is read your files and run cargo test, you wouldn't need a sandbox at all, the agent is the sandbox. Now you might say, but what if it needs to modify files? If you wanted to build a sandbox or approval workflow here, you'd put it right into your custom write tool. It could be an extension you just download so you can pick your favorite write tool. Instead, the authors of pi.dev chose the worst possible defaults.

unknownfuture 2mo ago

Honestly I think the thing I love most about Pi is that I'm not dealing with a tool with a thousand undiscovered features. I either pick and install what I want from the package ecosystem or I bottle up my own workflows into extensions as I find what works best for me. The result is that the tool gradually morphs into the thing I need rather than me having to adapt myself to whatever new thing Anthropic or OpenAI comes up with. I can also feel confident that the thing it becomes is what I actually need and not what maximizes token usage...

pornel 2mo ago

I'm enjoying the maximal version: https://omp.sh https://omp.sh

frogperson 2mo ago
OMP is great. I pair it with https://nono.sh/ https://nono.sh/ and sleep alot easier at night.
alasano 2mo ago
I find omp funny because it's the opposite of why Iike Pi.
- JSR_FDED 2mo ago
  It’s more like a curated config. Like using Astro or Lunar instead of starting with a plain Neovim and crafting your own configuration.
  - jeremyjh 2mo ago
    It goes further than that. I mean, it has a bash interpreter natively linked into it.
- WinstonSmith84 2mo ago
  it depends on how you see things. By default OMP with all its options turned off is very much like Pi, just with a better UX/UI - and - a faster start, somehow. And you can turn things on when needed. I see people like Pi because it's super skinny and they can tweak it with extensions A, B or C. I like OMP because I don't have to spend time figuring out the next best thing while there is a guy out there who knows (more than me) what he is doing and packaging all the good stuff into his app. Yes it's opinionated, but I use regularly half of the installed extensions - and occasionally play with other features too. But I can agree on a thing: the best for OMP would be to have a clear "list of extensions" that can be activated or deactivated (to unclutter the menus)
LaurensBER 2mo ago

esafak 2mo ago

I use pi for agentic CI; reviews, etc.

klooney 2mo ago
It's so easy- npm install, a little markdown boot camp, and you get great results.

swingboy 2mo ago

Aside from the minimal system prompt, how does it handle context better than other agents? It still has to send the system prompt (which includes AGENTS.md and skill definitions) along with the full conversation every request, no?

TheRoque 2mo ago
A lot of harnesses compress the context when it becomes massive, Pi doesn't do that out of the box (EDIT: that's wrong, as pointed out below). It can be both good and bad. Also since it doesn't have a lot of tools out of the box, the context is not polluted with external tool call descriptions that the agent has to be aware of. Basically, it doesn't handle the context "better", it barely does anything special to it, which can actually be better for cost efficiency.
- the_duke 2mo ago
  That's not true, pi auto-compacts when getting close to the context window limit?
- rahimnathwani 2mo ago
  Pi has auto compaction enabled by default: https://pi.dev/docs/latest/compaction https://pi.dev/docs/latest/compaction
  - TheRoque 2mo ago
    Ok my bad. I remember hearing that it was a criticism of common harnesses and that the creator of Pi wanted more control over that feature, so I assumed it wasn't enabled by default. Thank for pointing it out !
    - rahimnathwani 2mo ago
      It was introduced in late 2025: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/92 https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/92

jauntywundrkind 2mo ago

i really hope OpenCode v2 with the Effect internals can ascertain and realize and lock on to being the best extensibility platform, on to having a core that serves not just itself, it's conceits of/as product, but a wider world. a street that wants to "find it's own uses for things". it feels like there's still a strong layer of "for us" vs "for you" within opencode, that i hope, over time can get chewed away at. plugins to rebuild history, to re-title are just impossible, for example. none of these changes, these freedoms are hard to release. the patches i juggle are easy. but whether or not my agentic software serves as a substrate for my desire, or whether it allows me to augment agency: tis the question. Dax (opencode lead) has such humble takes, is so forthwith about trying failing trying again on and on. about iterative improvement. and it feels like the guts are so in line to deliver, to allow such freedom now in OpenCode. but i don't see the product (anti-product) alignment, where opencode understands that it's competition isn't cc or codex, which can't and won't ever really compete, but pi, that the competition is to be the putty, to deliver the agency, to be a substrate. really hoping, because i love opencode, and these internals in v2 are sick. the "devtools must be open sourced" debate comes screaming into the fore on this. it certainly argues similar to the post here: that it is minimalism, it is adaptability, programmability, it is directability that unlocks and unleashes us: > Imagine the convoluted misery it would be trying to plug that into the VS Code extensions API! Or trying to get it into vimdiff. It would certainly be possible, but the machinery to start pre-processing the commits as soon as they appear would be nigh-on impossible. - https://blog.exe.dev/devtools-must-be-open-source https://blog.exe.dev/devtools-must-be-open-source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 i don't even fully agree! today more than ever, why not cut a VS Code extension? why not cut some wild coop.nvim async extension that runs whatever subprocesses, talks to whatever system daemon? dream it up and do it; the llm's will cut through the mechanicals. but the core point, about finding software that doesn't obstruct, that accelerates the human agency: it's so Douglas Engelbart. to Augment Agency is so close akin to Augment Intellect, the grand passion for human interest engagement envolvement constructivism fucking-around-and-finding-out. and my how unhindered we can be now. if only our tools/systems/softwares let us be. here's to you, soft software!

Yiling-J 2mo ago

Pi is really good. For people who want to build their own agent with even more minimal and extensible, the underlying agent harness is also worth looking: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/agent/src/harness https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/agen...

langs 2mo ago

Pi’s minimalism reveals a simple truth: the LLM is the core of any agent harness. Consequently, much of current harness tuning will become redundant(or even a hindrance) with next-gen models.

prettyblocks 2mo ago
I always thought that the frontier coding models were specifically trained to perform well in the harness from their providers. I imagine this will always be the case to some extent.
- zahrevsky 2mo ago
  Yes, and the article makes the point that this might be changing.
- tudelo 2mo ago
  From what I understand pre-training is totally irrelevant to this and as far as post training goes there will be multiple steps, for claude and codex and the like that ship with a harness, the harness is definitely included in evaluation. However, they will definitely include evaluation from a variety or even none, and settle on something that works the "best" for a release. Disclaimer: No first hand knowledge
- strobe 2mo ago
  even if they are is no guarantee that for 'your' specific tasks is beneficial in any means

yogthos 2mo ago

I found the nice part of Pi was the plugin system and the ability to hook into any part of the agentic loop. But minimalism is a net negative in my experience. What you really want is a harness that meets the expectations of the model and steers it in the right direction. There are also a ton of small mechanical things a harness can handle that make the whole process much smoother. A really simple example is auto balancing parens. Even frontier models like Claude still struggle with this. Often the model will end up writing a python script to figure out where the mismatch is, and then generate a new version of the code. All of that simply wastes tokens and eats up context on a task that could've been accomplished completely mechanically. The approach I took with dirge, is to put the model in a loop where it has clearly defined tasks, and the harness handles any repairs that can be done automatically. And I used Janet to provide a plugin system based on what Pi is doing. You get a batteries included experience out of the box, and you can customize it to fit a specific project using plugins if needed. https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-06-08-dirge-code.html https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-06-08-dirge-code.html

orliesaurus 2mo ago

If someone has never used Pi, what's a good starting point where someone took Pi and started adding some extensions etc to get to that minimal-but-useful-and-productive-for-coding state? Is there such recipe/writeup?

kadoban 2mo ago
You can just fire it up and ask it to suggest some, or look on the site at the most downloaded and see which sound useful to you. That's basically what I did. I also put in some work to containerize it and do some manual/automatic checks to lock down extensions a bit, but that's just me. It really doesn't take much for it to be useful, maybe something to search the web? If you want you can just tell it to write you extensions too, like one to wrap curl so it can get to the web easier for instance. Or just tell it to use curl, really up to you. Just an example to point out: like, do whatever, it's very flexible.
ssivark 2mo ago
It's already in that minimal but useful state so you can just start and ask it to write code. If you want a more tricked out "starter pack" there's oh-my-pi or lazypi and maybe a few others. But worth being careful what you install because 1. A full pack of extensions can destroy the minimalism of pi 2. Random extentions are a security nightmare.
rahimnathwani 2mo ago
Mario recommends you don't do that. You could try ohmypi but it sort of misses the point. Why not just install nicopreme's pi-subagents and pi-web-access and then install whatever else you need when you find it's missing?
schneehertz 2mo ago
Just install Pi and start using it directly, no extensions needed for Pi to get the job done. Only when you genuinely find a feature is missing should you write one yourself or have Pi write an extension or skill for you. Don't use extensions written by others, after all, those extensions were also vibe-coded.
2mo ago

tosh 2mo ago

i also found re context window: less is more at least with GPT 5.6 Sol fwiw https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ sh is all you need

sebmellen 2mo ago
Do you use smol? How do you find it compares to other harnesses for things like MCP connections? I’m tempted to use it since I’m a fan of the philosophy.
- tosh 2mo ago
  I use it for smaller changes (no compaction yet) If I have agents.md or other context I want it to read I mention it at the beginning of the session re MCP: I am not using an MCP with smol but there are ways to convert MCPs into CLI tools or typed js I imagine that would work well/more token efficient with smol (or most harnesses actually) The best thing I found so far re smol is that it fits into the context window with plenty of room to spare So it is easy to adapt (and add stuff to it, even stuff you only need specifically for just 1 project) Whereas adapting a more complex harness is more error prone
  - sebmellen 2mo ago
    I didn't realize you were the author. Super cool! I'll be trying it out. I do like the grug-brain approach of keeping things extremely simple and easy to reason about. One thing that I don't like about Pi is that it's almost too extensible, in the sense that I can add a lot of shit into it without really understanding what a given extension is doing. And both from a security and token efficiency standpoint, I like the premise of converting things like MCPs into CLIs. It might be worth investing in tooling that works nicely with the agent harness, but that is not directly integrated with it. I'd be glad to work on that for smol if I can get a workflow going.
    - tosh 2mo ago
      I'm glad there are quite a few good open source ones by now. Also happy with how much love codex gets from OpenAI. That said: I was looking at existing agents to find one to build upon and to me they were all too complex and were leaning too heavily into 3rd party dependencies. Nothing I could understand comfortably in an afternoon (that's also on me I guess). Pi was closest to what I was looking for but still too big and too modular. (It's hard to come up with good abstractions that work well across all major models + keep up with new concepts that come and go all the time with new releases.) The more complex agents err on the side of supporting many models 'ok' instead of focusing on taking advantage of a specific model. With a tiny implementation it is easier to adapt it. Adding new stuff, removing stuff again, changing it from working well specifically with GPT 5.6 Sol to working with the exact model I want.

astrobiased 2mo ago

Pi does one thing that I love, developing a tool that has minimalism where it's easily configurable with good documentation. The leads to new use cases that the the author(s) would have never dreamed of. The organic growth process of the Pi ecosystem has been fascinating to observe. It's one of the reasons why Pi has become one of my favorite coding agents to this day, flexible beyond personal uses and extensible to larger environments. IMO, I view it more than a coding agent, it's a coding agent platform with powerful extensibility.

para_parolu 2mo ago

Pi is awesome. I built whole agentic ide on top of pi and obsidian. The fact that I can modify it easily makes a difference

mw888 2mo ago

I like Pi, but I didn't end up using it. I tried OpenCode, Pi, Zed Editor and some NVIM packages. I wanted open source, featureful and easy to use. Specifically I wanted to easily edit the agent prompt. I ended up on VS Code. I'm very critical of Microsoft generally, but VS Code is a very good editor and my favorite agent harness. For headless, Pi might be the way.

imagetic 2mo ago

+1 #teampi

ironfootnz 2mo ago

I think for indie hackers and people that build their own stack is great, but real scenario and people with money Enterprise likes the idea of batteries included. I found this one a little bit better and they do support Extensions like Pi. But comes with all features like codex, claude code and it's open-source. https://github.com/autohandai/code-cli https://github.com/autohandai/code-cli

jbs789 2mo ago
What it hints at is the direction of model agnostic and custom agents. I could see companies using Pi to create a product for orgs, for example. Low cost and closer to the customer needs than a general harness.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  This is the new enterprise trend (RAG? no, we need our own pi plugin/adaptation).
  - jbs789 2mo ago
    It’s interesting. Many ways these things will be optimised. Just at the beginning !

r0b05 2mo ago

I love using Pi and its design philosophy. The minimalism is what resonates with me. It just works, update after update.

manoji 2mo ago

I love Pi . I have been building an agent using its agent harness https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/agent https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/agen... . I love the simplicity .

mraza007 2mo ago

Pi Agent has been one of my favorite harness when it comes to using with local models I had a lot of success running it on my Mac with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model

mark_l_watson 2mo ago
Same experience, sometimes using Little Coder helps make things faster because it is built on pi and strips out some functionality. Probably best to stick with pi however, adding pi-sandbox for some security. I will only run Little Coder in an Apple Container.
- mraza007 2mo ago
  Haven’t heard about little corer but I’ll give it a try

eclipxe 2mo ago

I built Fusion (software factory) on top of Pi and have been thrilled with it https://github.com/Runfusion/Fusion https://github.com/Runfusion/Fusion

1saadcodes 2mo ago

This seems like a more natural use of agents than asking them to one shot and push to prod. Give them a measurable objective, let them experiment, and judge the outcome instead of the implementation. Similar to how you would deal with a junior or intern basically

grewil2 2mo ago

Are all of you pi users paying Anthropic and OpenAI for API usage? Or can you combine pi with a subscription? So far API usage is a lot more expensive than subscription and if you need better models than Deepseek and Kimi, and you are not wealthy, I don’t see a way around this.

danslo 2mo ago
You can use both providers in Pi using subscriptions. Be careful with Anthropic though, it’s against their TOS.
- thehours 2mo ago
  Doesn’t using the Anthropic subscription this way get charged as extra usage, and thus effectively billed at API rates?
  - danslo 2mo ago
    Oh, I stand corrected. It's been a while since I've used their models. Glad we can still use OpenAI subscription through Pi.
  - colinmarc 2mo ago
    I use my Anthropic subscription with Pi. I thought they would start charging me API usage at some point, but it never happened. (If it did happen, I would switch to open weights models.)
    - colinmarc 2mo ago
      ...funnily enough, a few hours after posting this, it stopped working.
  - thepasch 2mo ago
    Not if you run your own system prompt that does not explicitly contain the term "pi coding agent". Perhaps they string-match against some other stuff, too, but as long as you paraphrase the system prompt a bit, you should be fine.

jedisct1 2mo ago

https://swival.dev https://swival.dev remains my favorite agent for local models.

kamikazechaser 2mo ago

If using outside of subscriptions, It is almost a no brainer to use this simple because of the efficiency. With subscriptions, not so good. Even the officially endorsed OpenAI integration lacks support for server-side context compaction (without a separate plugin which still triggers the pi native compaction).

rcarmo 2mo ago
I added that in https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw a few weeks back. The reason it’s not in pi-ai is that server-side OpenAI compaction is encrypted/opaque and (at least in my experience) can cause issues when switching models.

genericacct 2mo ago

Only thing that runs easily on termux now that gemini-cli has been discontinued..

yawpitch 2mo ago

But wouldn’t Tau be twice as good as Pi?

rcarmo 2mo ago
It already is, to the point I’ve forked it https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/tau-prime https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/tau-prime and am playing with bolting on my “standard” web UI onto it.

whazor 2mo ago

Both Codex and Claude have trained their models to their harnesses. There are some experimentations by Igor Warzocha to extract Codex shapes and put it in Pi: https://github.com/IgorWarzocha/howaboua-pi-stuff/tree/main/packages/pi-codex-conversion https://github.com/IgorWarzocha/howaboua-pi-stuff/tree/main/... I'm expecting every model will have a fine tuned Pi extension at some point.

rcarmo 2mo ago
I’ve been using both families of models inside pi/piclaw (https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/ https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/) and I assure you they work _better_ in that environment than in the originals. The models are not trained to the harnesses, the harnesses provide cues that the models follow.
- whazor 2mo ago
  You can see the approach in his post: https://howaboua.dev/writing/how-i-gave-pi-17-tools-without-loading-17-schemas/ https://howaboua.dev/writing/how-i-gave-pi-17-tools-without-... The result: 38% fewer startup tokens, 17 tools exposed through just three schemas, and 19 skills loaded only when needed.
  - n6242 2mo ago
    The changing header is really distracting when trying to read your blog. Then it followed me when I scrolled and I just gave up.
    - whazor 2mo ago
      Not my blog :)
  - rcarmo 2mo ago
    It's pretty much what I do as well, piclaw has had selective tool activation since... March, I think.
2mo ago

pixlmint 2mo ago

that website is horrendous to look at on an eink display btw

carlsborg 2mo ago

They removed ~80% of Claude Code’s system prompt for Claude 5 models so the harness cost-per-task benchmark could be stale.

rcarmo 2mo ago

I built https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/ https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/ on top of pi largely leveraging its extension philosophy (I extended the contract to UI extensions, basically) and am very happy with the results. Even though I added a few more tools, the core agent is wonderful.

paldepind2 2mo ago

Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion. Given all the hype, I was a bit underwhelmed by Pi. It definitely has some good ideas around customization, but it annoyed me in many little ways. For a program that's minimal it sure takes a long time to start up, the standard C-p and C-n bindings don't work, it doesn't follow the XDG Base Directory Specification and just pollutes my $HOME directory. I think there's still space for another harness that's 1/ open-source, 2/ written in a fast compiled language (Rust, Go, etc.) and scriptable in a simple (aka non-JS) scripting language (Lua, etc.), 3/ less opinionated and more sensible so things like XDG isn't a WONTFIX.

intothemild 2mo ago
I really really like pi. But I agree with you, it's biggest weakness is that for a real long time the tagline of it was "there are many harnesses, this one is MINE" (That being Mario's) I have a lot of respect for Mario and his team, but there's things like you've pointed out that deviate from standards, and other issues that I've seen get posted, only to get knocked down by the team as WON'T FIX because, even though the new owners changed the tagline from MINE to YOURS... It's still very much Mario's. I do like opinionated things. Truly. But I'm also of the opinion that standards exist for a reason. That said. I like Pi so much that it's my daily driver, and I've created an ecosystem of plugins to do everything I want, having them all tie together and communicate through the shared bus. Pi is really a good harness. It's just, well. I don't agree with some of the opinions. If I'm going to add another thing here... Whilst you cannot get everything you need from the openAI API spec, you can get a surprising amount to get a model config. That said. Versions of Pi are still shipping with model configs for certain inference providers. I do hope that gets decoupled at some stage. I see the groundwork being laid. So the work is being done in the right direction. I applaud the team but I do get the feeling that a lot of this is because people want to contribute, but the team really wants to hand craft this. And that's great
- bacteria 2mo ago
  Could you share some of the ecosystem/plugins/workflows you're using with Pi?

kriro 2mo ago

Philosophically, pi.dev is exactly what I'm looking for. Minimalist and explicit (YOLO by default, we know it can be trouble but we tell you so). Anyone here using the Rust rewrite of pi.dev as their daily driver? It's endorsed by the author of pi.dev and looks pretty attractive to me being both minimalist and not having npm attached. Any info "from the trenches" are appreciated (setup with sandboxing, extra niceties etc).

badlogic 2mo ago
i don't remember endorsing any rust rewrite of pi.
- kriro 2mo ago
  Ok, I'm a dummy: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust "pi_agent_rust is a from-scratch Rust port of Pi Agent by Mario Zechner (made with his blessing!)." It's pi, not pi.dev

efilife 2mo ago

And I thought that this was going to be about the number PI

mft_ 2mo ago

I’m going to go against the grain and say that Pi is a little too minimal by default. The emacs comparison is interesting, but default Pi is like emacs that can load files but you’ve got to extend it manually to save or search within a file. I’d argue that there’s a minimal set of functions that a coding harness needs to just enable a model to get stuff done, and they shouldn’t be an extra effort to set up. (Oh-my-pi exists for those of a similar persuasion.)

v3gas 2mo ago
What is that set of functions for you?
- mft_ 2mo ago
  I can't offer a definitive list. But some/all of web access, web search, sub-agents, plan, goals, looping, and maybe a to-do list. I'd suggest the default should be anything that makes the model more efficient or effective to a reasonable current level.
  - newtwilly 2mo ago
    I disagree on plan and todo-list, which seem relatively not needed to me. No comment on goals/looping, which I don't have much experience with. To me it's great how minimal the system prompt and tool set is, and I doubt those features are worth the tokens for every model. (Who knows if they improve performance for SOTA models, and they probably harm performance for small local models.) I would add "better sandbox" support, which I think should be included out of the box. Not having a very simple way to get out of "yolo" mode is kinda crazy. Sure, there are plugins, but they do have some issues. pi-bash-approval is good, but manual approval plus allowlist is a "bad" way to run coding agents. The "best" way in my current opinion, is where commands run by default in a sandbox, but commands can be ran unsandboxed as needed, requiring approval or allow-list in that case. Cursor was pretty good at this (when I used it). For example I don't want to configure my sandbox with access to docker, which would present easy jailbreaks, but I do want to allowlist certain docker commands or approve them to run on my host as needed. pi-sandbox is good at allowing me to configure sandbox access, but this feature where somethings can run unsandboxed is missing. I write more about this and about (hacky, but productive enough) workaround here: https://github.com/carderne/pi-sandbox/issues/50 https://github.com/carderne/pi-sandbox/issues/50

JonasHB97 2mo ago

We are just moving towards simpler an simpler agent setups. The harness moat will dissapear

nylonstrung 2mo ago

Unrelated to Pi (which is great) can we please stop using LoTR names for companies. The Peter Thiel glazing/cargo culting is pretty cringe at this point

627467 2mo ago
Example of how easily humans are biased by the bubble they live in and start projecting assumptions everywhere (seemingly against their own interest). Please provide evidence of relationship of pi/earendil to peter thiel. I also suggest that if you believe peter thiel relationship with anything is a nuisance then - maybe - try avoiding gut-assigning links of anything in the world to him. you maybe see things in more positive light and it would be fairer to those things. Peter thiel doesnt own tolkien work. The world is bigger than one mans bias
jmuguy 2mo ago
To paraphrase Office Space - Why should we change names? He's the one who sucks.

pmilanez 2mo ago

Is there any good benchmarks for coding harness? In terms of tokens consumption, Pi is awesome..local model etc. But regarding coding quality, task completion, over engineering, all related to the final result that the LLM is delivering trough the harness, is there any benchmark that shows the ups and downs of each one? I'm struggling rotating harness because of a lack os a way to truly compared what is good or not.

tosh 2mo ago
it's very difficult and time-consuming to make good comparisons (especially for open ended tasks) also because there are so many configuration options - which env do you provide? - which model(s)? - subagents? - system prompt (default or custom?)? - agents.md etc etc also you kinda have to look at many runs and study their traces, if you look at too few runs the outcome variability you're drawing from is too high
alansaber 2mo ago
Feels like a problem where you have to quantify/test for your own use-case. Otherwise just go by the generic SWE-bench scores etc.
easymuffin 2mo ago
One recent example but also quite specific to Kimi K3 can be found here https://xcancel.com/composio/status/2083161873357111297 https://xcancel.com/composio/status/2083161873357111297

senko 2mo ago

Meta: this reads like a corporate article, info-selling a solution to enterprises. The style is a far cry from anything Mario or Armin usually write. First indication of business strategy around Pi's reverse acquisition of Earendil, perhaps?

sunaookami 2mo ago
The first indication was them adding telemetry to Pi right after the acquisition.

nicman23 2mo ago

name your product pi become ~~ungovernable~~ ungooglable

rbanffy 2mo ago

We are having a problem with namespace collisions. I really thought this was related to the Raspberry Pi (which is a very minimalist computer). Earlier today, I saw something about a Rio terminal and thought about Plan9.

ljosifov 2mo ago

Love pi. It's good to have a minimal agent, always welcome. Even if only to bootstrap install other agents. E.g. recently Hermes stopped installing under Termux (v0.19 - no, v0.18 - yes). Agent pi to the rescue: installed it under Termux (Android), started it, pointed pi to the Hermes github, asked for v0.18 specifically - and it did it. Cherry on the top - asked it to install a plugin from github I use (unmerged PR), did that too. Even if nowadays for coding I mostly use OMP (the pi with wheels and bells and whistles). For general computer use mostly use Hermes. Model-tied harnesses have their place e.g. Codex for me. I never know if it's allowed or banned using the sub from non-Codex harness - so stick with it. Even if only to have the 'canonical reference setup' to compare with and measure against.

ncrmro 2mo ago

We’ve been building atop the .agents standard and have written some tools around this under the ai-outfitter org few interesting repos. - outfitter compose different agent profile w, eg skills, mcp, context and wrap pi,Claude,codex - agent-operator run these agents into kubernetes - actions run pi during investigations on failed ci or weekly updates - channels give pi agents an inbox for slack/email/websocket access, calendar wake ups - deepwork build long running workflows with verification gates The best example of different profiles is having a prod/nonprod bot that has grafana mcp for incident investigation

archargelod 2mo ago

Sorry for negativity, but it wouldn't hurt to put some qualifier in the title, like, "Pi agent". So people, not interested in that theme can avoid your article. Thank you. I was expecting an article about Pi constant or maybe raspberry Pi computer. "My Disappointment Is Immeasurable And My Day Is Ruined!"

TacticalCoder 2mo ago
I'm very excited about pi.dev but naming it Pi when there are people like me who've got seven Raspberry Pi around is just... Confusing. To me there's pi, the constant. Then there's "a pi": a Raspberry Pi. Now there's "pi, the agent" too. It gets confusing. Especially if you use pi on a Pi to write code that uses pi.
toephu2 2mo ago
When I first heard about pi.dev I was also initially confused. Raspberry Pi is already very big in the hacker community... they really should not have named this harness "Pi".

vinhnx 2mo ago

Small model-facing surface, more responsibility in the harness. I'm exploring that tradeoff in Rust with VT Code: https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode

mark_l_watson 2mo ago

I am starting to share the opinion in the article. I used to use Claude Code with strong open models, and sometimes pay for Opus. Now one of my main drivers is out of the box pi’s 4 built in tools, and I add just two extra tools: pi-sandbox and a paid for search service tool. This setup works great with the latest deepseek v4 flash, switching to more powerful open models occasionally. I wrote my own coding harness in Common Lisp that is almost free or 3rd party libraries and I basically copied pi + the 6 tools I use for pi (except I have two search tools using different vendors in my Common Lisp code). Everyone (and every company?) should run their own tests and experiments. I find it sad when I talk with people who default to the most complex and the most expensive tools without even trying to evaluate alternatives.

vcfgdev 2mo ago

I really like Pi and have recommended it to many people. It has been my daily driver for months and really changed my perspective on how to design tools. The `bash` tool is magic.

lukelabs 2mo ago

[flagged]

surgical_fire 2mo ago

I recently moved entirely to Pi, and I am really enjoying the journey so far. I am slowly shaping it to the way I like to work. It's a bit of a bumpy start, but there are two benefits I see from it: First is that you get to understand better what goes on behind the scenes. Since it is minimalistic, you have to think about your workflow, about what you want your agents to do, how you want them to do it, etc. It's a completely different way to work since tools like ClaudeCode do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes and just force on you their established way of doing things. By adding the building blocks yourself, you end up with a better understanding (and in many ways, control) of what is happening there. Second, I adore how I can juggle sessions in Pi. /tree, /clone and /name quickly became second nature for me to manage agents. I am totally abusing prompt templates in my development workflows. Also, it is an awesome harness for the models I use. DS and MiMo feel very snappy now, especially after I started to adapt Pi to my way of working. Lastly, even though those models are already cheap even on Claude Code, it feels like it is even cheaper now.

0xdeadbeefbabe 2mo ago

It would be funny if suckless.org had a harness.

sage981 2mo ago

Under 1,000 tokens for the system prompt and tool defs is the number that matters here. Everything else is downstream of not crowding the context.

jsw97 2mo ago

A fundamental limitation of third-party harnesses is that they can't see all the data. As earendil pointed out, providers are now moving to encrypted thinking blocks. As an example, this could affect compaction. If pi calls another agent to do the compacting, that agent can't read the encrypted thinking blocks. In contrast, if codex calls another openai-codex agent to do the compaction, they can feed that agent the thinking blocks. In theory, this additional information could be useful to the compacting agent. In practice, I don't think it helps too much right now. But I could see ways for providers to exploit this to drive a bigger wedge between their harnesses and pi.

troyvit 2mo ago
This is interesting because of just how old-school SaaS it is. They're using old modes to build a wider moat around their product, hoping that it will keep their customers within it. The AI boom feels different from the SaaS boom though because of all the different flavors of open that are available to people right now, from self-hosting your own stuff if you're a rich tinkerer to hooking up to OpenRouter or another service and getting your pick of models. I feel like some of the biggest providers are going to find themselves on the wrong side of the moat because, despite being massive innovators in their field they're monetizing it like they did in 2014.

monkeydust 2mo ago

I do think that the value of these harnesses is inverse to the abilities of the frontier models - meaning - that as the models get smarter (by whatever benchmark you want to use) the harness matters less - it becomes more around context i.e. data.

toephu2 2mo ago

re: overloaded naming Anyone else think "Pi" was a bad naming choice? raspberry pi was already big in the hacker community

browningstreet 2mo ago

I think banging on the "pi minimalism" thing is already old. Pi needs to have another dagger in its cachet. And frankly, I'm already tired of fighting Claude's lack of proper memory. So I guess I'm not-minimalism, but does that make me a maximalist? I'm getting more development done with opencode, orca, and hermes. I do care about the harness though, as it extracts more juice from the rock model.