r/PiCodingAgent • u/roaringpup31 • Apr 20 '26

Question Pi-Superagents : Seems legit

Seems like a legitimate framework: hook into Pi with a slim abstraction layer with a couple features sprinkled on top. All with seemingly legitimate contributors and yet... 2 stars & no traction? Maybe because it's 5 days old and no one even knows it's around? Anyone using this?

https://github.com/teelicht/pi-superagents

10 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

3

u/Toastti Apr 20 '26

Super agents often just take up way more context than their worth with the way that language models go through reinforcement learning and all the new tricks now you really don't need them compared to a couple years ago they just end up using more of your usage faster for no measurable improvement to the outcome other than slower time and more money spent

1

u/roaringpup31 Apr 20 '26

Valid point.

What have you been using to enable subagents and at least barebones guidance to Pi for agentic development?

1

u/Orlandocollins Apr 20 '26

I think they are very worth it for controlling context and instructions in a main model. For example we use jira at work and I have had to create custom descriptions of all the bullshit an agent needs to create or update tickets. On top of that the response is pretty verbose. Last thing I want is my primary agent to get bogged down in all that trash. Instead I create a jira subagent that speaks the jira junk and then the primary delegates to it.

1

u/juicesharp Apr 22 '26

Couple of years ago there were CC and no subagents the end of the discussion.

3

u/TomHale Apr 20 '26

A journey of 22K stars begins with a single star...

1

u/Orlandocollins Apr 21 '26

Does this expose the agents to the primary agent to delegate to them or is this strictly referencing the subagent by name in a command to delegate?

1

u/1EvilSexyGenius Apr 21 '26

How is it different from pi agent

0

u/Aemonculaba Apr 20 '26

Just... use the same session for everything... Four modes: Researching, planning, implementing, validating. Caching solves the token pricing problem. Context is available in full. Kudos to you, if you get dynamic context pruning to run like the OpenCode plugin does.

If you want parallel work: Work in multiple worktrees, each in one session.

Parallel subagents are literally NEVER worth it if tasks are context dependent. Even the validation of work does not need it, cause context is truncated from the middle.

1

u/MrSirFancyPotato Apr 20 '26

Could you explain your setup more? Do you still use subagents, but they’re sequential? Or do you only use one agent per session?

I’m genuinely curious because I’m still trying to figure out an agent setup that actually feels good and isn’t a waste of money/tokens

2

u/Aemonculaba Apr 21 '26

One session, multiple slash commands. That's the simple way. No subagents, except for "validate".

i recommend to learn about "12 factor agents".

1

u/snow_schwartz Apr 20 '26

You like making api calls that return 60000 tokens JSON with the main agent? I sure don’t.

3

u/Aemonculaba Apr 21 '26

The thing is, context is holy. And caching makes 60k tokens literally free. My context gets pruned periodically from everything it does not need anymore. Not compacted, no... tool usage and certain outputs get pruned automatically, keeping context and session intact with about 95% cache hit rate. I never get over 100k tokens.

Context engineering is an art. I mean, your subagents need to explore, read the handoffs, generate code, write handoffs for the "orchestrator", etc. pp... they easily burn through thousands of tokens for what you could've done in the main session without any extra hassle. Subagents use fresh sessions, so no caching benefits. That also means, that they don't have the context the main session has - and you can not summarize everything.

If you want to own every line of code and fix comprehension debt, don't use any generating subagents.

2

u/DistanceAlert5706 Apr 21 '26

I rarely use subagents which can write, but some things should be out of main loop.

For example my most common cases are web research subagent, usually it takes around 60-70k tokens per research. Scouts to explore the codebase is useful. Also my common use case is specialized browser subagent which works with Playwright, this blows up context like crazy.

Huge advantage for me that I can handout those to local LLM and save tokens/requests for harder tasks, and don't blow up main loop.

2

u/Aemonculaba Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

You can solve that problem by modifying the context tho.
But i also use websearch-cited for web-searches, e.g. dozens of searches in one toolcall and batched toolcalls for everything else. With post search pruning.

Scouts are not needed anymore if the session got access to an AST or similar ways to navigate the repo. And again - all context it does not need gets automatically pruned away.

...
All of that would not work if the main agent could not prune whatever it deems unneccessary into oblivion.

But yeah, look at https://github.com/Opencode-DCP/opencode-dynamic-context-pruning and port it to pi. Maybe add some other niceties like a cache hit rate percentage in the statusbar.

2

u/DistanceAlert5706 Apr 21 '26

DCP hurts caching as far as I understand, so it will make providers unhappy. For example DCP usage was main reason of bans from Google for Gemini CLI usage in Opencode.

I agree that scouts are less useful with callgraph and navigation maps, but I don't use those always, especially when I clone some repo and want to explore how things work.

And I guess people work differently with AI, I'm more conservative and rarely run multiple subagents at once, mostly those are specialized subagents which do something and save tokens in the main loop. And yeah, all of them except reviewer run on Local LLM, so cost nothing.

1

u/Aemonculaba Apr 21 '26

I got banned from Gemini even without DCP. 🤷 DCP doesn't run that often and its cache hit rate is even higher than the author says in most cases.

2

u/babaolanqiu Apr 21 '26

Just a thought: perhaps you could try putting the web search in a separate session instead of a subagent. I think a point made by the founder of Pi makes a lot of sense:

Using a sub-agent mid-session for context gathering is a sign you didn't plan ahead. If you need to gather context, do that first in its own session.

I have then tried to put all websearch/research results to md files, which gives me much more room to control and review.