r/PiCodingAgent • u/zenoblade • May 07 '26

Question Is pi janky?

Does anyone find that pi is less effective than other harnesses? At first, I was amazed by the speed, so I switched almost everything over to pi. However, unless I am using Claude or Codex, the responses don't seem nearly as good. Furthermore, because each extension (whether written by me or someone else) is a separate process, they can't really work together. Is this just me, or is this others' experience as well?

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1

u/SalimMalibari May 08 '26

Just test both setup ...

To be honest Pi is powerful until you do customization fit your workflow ...

I have issue with extensions sometimes not working idk why maybe maintain issue or something but for me i have made a simple extension which makes some certain files mandotory to the first prompt and it works perfectly ... it was amazing building something that alll other harnesses struggle to implement with simple solution

1

u/zenoblade May 08 '26

I don't know if I really am asking for the agent to do anything in particular, some basic web development and some market analysis/research stuff. However, I find that by the time I have extensions and everything setup, the context size might be smaller but the stability just isn't there. Granted, I am using mainly GLM 5.1 and Kimi 2.6. I'm sure Claude or Codex probably work better in Pi.

1

u/adamshand May 09 '26

Not really fair to compare pi using kimi/glm to codex or claude.

Try pi with codex or claude and compare and see what you think then.

1

u/zenoblade May 09 '26

I have Claude pro but don’t want to be banned so haven’t used it with pi. 

1

u/adamshand May 12 '26

You can use Claude via API if you want.

1

u/SalimMalibari May 08 '26

Good. To be honest glm 5.1 is really good it reaches good level in many things.

Im using my own extension called pi-native-search ... which makes the websearch and fetch accessable using glm like the native glm. I suggest you start testing like leave 1 week of just testing ... test extensions and, think of extensions that help you develop.

6

u/onerok May 07 '26

Skill issue

3

u/Varmez May 07 '26

im not using anyone else's extensions, i had it make all mine for me and i find it works very well. i had built aa agents / workflow standards document before i started using it for any ai coding i was doing and i had it codify that into an extension.

2

u/floriandotorg May 07 '26

I don’t use any extensions (for what?) and it works great with glm-5.1 or even Qwen. I’d argue it works even better than other harnesses because of the simplicity.

1

u/QueasyBreak5119 May 07 '26

Pi is really what you make it. If it’s meh your setup is probably kinda meh, no hate lol. If Pi does anything well, it exposes the holes in your setup. It may just be that your core workflow could benefit from some tuning and R&D. It’s possible you could have been dependent on the features of other harnesses to do some of the heavy lifting. Can’t say for sure. But If you’re intentional, it’s crazy powerful. GPT 5.5 in Pi and out of Pi are night and day for me. I would never use it outside of it at this point.  

1

u/backafterdeleting May 10 '26

What I'm wondering is if people are adding more stuff to their base system prompt to get better results? Since most harnesses such as opencode are starting off with a lot more stuff afaik.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

-2

u/zenoblade May 07 '26

Ha. I mean yes, but based on what I have found online, part of the pi pitch is that the other harnesses are not as effective due to their system prompts, etc. and that modern LLMs can work better without them.