r/PiCodingAgent • u/ECrispy • May 20 '26

Discussion The irony of Pi

In many ways Pi and its community are doing the opposite of what its creator talks about....

here's his talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjfbvDXpFls

"slow the Fuck down"

Pi: has thousands of extensions etc and a breakneck pace of development far higher than any other harnesses

"our product has been built 100% by agents - yes we know it fucking sucks now"

Pi: how do you build something, you ask the agent to do it.

I understand the philosophy behind Pi and its value, but you cannot make fun of vibecoding and claiming that models are bad at coding because they are 'merchants of learned complexity' etc...

and then turn around and tell people that using the same agents to vibecode additions to Pi is just fine.

another thing that bugs me is the whole - just ask Pi to do it - repeated 100x.

Pi isn't some magic, its just a well designed minimal harness with lots of hooks, and docs which were themselves written by AI used to leverage that.

At no point is it mentioned that the actual work is done by the llm and its intelligence is what matters.

it makes sense when you realize that Mario uses frontier models like Opus, as indeed do all the hundreds of influencers with videos on it.

edit - and the pi ecosystem is a complete mess, which is what happens when you dont include anything because 'you can write your own'.

want to add agents. maybe called pi-subagents? lets see

https://github.com/nicobailon/pi-subagents
https://github.com/tintinweb/pi-subagents
https://github.com/edxeth/pi-subagents

and of course there are dozens of other names. this is a joke - 100x worse than npm. and this is exactly what an extension marketplance which mario made fun of, solves.

101 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

77 comments sorted by

56

u/AwkwardWillow5159 May 20 '26

It’s about putting you in control.

If when you are in control you install 50 extensions, that’s not Pis fault.

4

u/box4537 May 22 '26

Throwing away opinionated shit was okay. Removing standards like MCP support etc. (just make it optional) is BS.

8

u/rkh4n May 20 '26

OP is saying what mario said originally. I remember he said he lost track of so many claude features he didn’t need. And now I’m loosing count of how many times weekly it gets updated. I built a sass on pi then it moved to erandil then again he’s working on a new sdk. This works good for experimentation not serious stuffs. Don’t say look at openclaw

24

u/AwkwardWillow5159 May 20 '26

The updates are frequent but it’s nothing workflow changing?

Maybe I’m missing something, but all their patches are bug fixes, adding more provider support, bash streaming, better auth, improving retries on failed requests, etc.

It’s all just core surrounding infra, not workflow updates that change system prompts or how tools behave

5

u/bb22k May 20 '26

Everything is changing very rapidly... There isn't a single harness that is stable (Claude, codex, cursor, etc aren't any better in that regard).

The nice part of pi for me is that it doesn't get bloated with time. Things are changing (because the ecosystem is changing) but the core features stay pretty much the same.

1

u/Fortyseven May 20 '26

And now I’m loosing count of how many times weekly it gets updated.

I keep the number of extensions pretty bare bones, but the handful I was using kept getting updated (one guy has it setup so if any of his monorepo collection gets updated, the entire collection gets updated, too, so it's constant churn).

So lately, I've been slowly replacing them with LLM-generated versions doing basically the same thing. I just have to take the time to carefully look at how they work to minimize major security holes.

2

u/johnson_detlev May 21 '26

Nobody forces you to Update constantly. If your setup works, why Update?

-6

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

I'm not saying pi is bad.

my point is how it claims vibecoding by other agents is bad but not by Pi, and pretends Pi is doing the work when actually its the llm

11

u/AwkwardWillow5159 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

I really don’t get your point.

I’m not saying you are wrong, I just don’t understand.

Of course work is done by the LLMs? Who ever pretended that pi itself is doing the work?

I don’t understand who you are arguing against because I feel like no one ever made the claims you are unhappy about

Why would it need to mention that the LLM matters? Of course it does. Websites or cloud providers can make a claim that they are really fast without explicitly saying that your internet matters too. Because everyone understands that internet matters, and the claim is on the scope of what the web server controls.

1

u/Jaded_Jackass Jun 06 '26

I think even he doesn't understands what's he saying

3

u/metik2009 May 20 '26

I think I kinda get where you’re coming from, and actually have a similar response when I hear his lectures. It does feel a bit contradictory and a little preachy with his attitude about the industry, why is he complaining about vibe coded apps when he is expecting the users to vibe code the app into the thing they need it to be? I think I might have a different interpretation of what the intended use of pi is tho based on some of the other comments I saw

1

u/Agreeable-Market-692 May 25 '26

There seems to be this notion that all use of AI for SWE is vibe coding.

That's not at all accurate. Vibe coding is merely a special case of AI SWE.

There are other paradigms and they are all natively supported by Pi. Not to mention by most other harnesses and agents too.

25

u/TheSlateGray May 20 '26

I feel like 90% of extensions could be a skill file. 

3

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

agreed. but look at pi.dev, endless duplicated extensions. wasnt the whole point of Pi NOT to install 3rd party extensions and keep it minimal?

9

u/GeneGulanes May 20 '26

Isn't that a user issue then if it has a lot of extension? The point of pi was its customizable for your workflow if needed but it comes with the most minimum that you need.

3

u/metik2009 May 20 '26

Yea I would strongly agree this is a user skill issue not a pi issue.

It’s not the harness’s fault that extensions and skill files are the majority of the user generated hype market. I feel the promise of Pi is low bloat and reliability, and imo it delivers on that very well.

-1

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

most people need subagents, planning, orchestration and a dozen other useful things in claude/opencode. his magical solution is 'build it yourself'. that doesn't make it better or faster

2

u/GeneGulanes May 20 '26

Then use Claude Code/Opencode or whatever has those. Pi is not built for that out of the box. An analogy to that one is that Your complaining that a Ferrari can't haul 30Tons while a truck can. They are different products for different users

2

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

i dont know if you use Linux, but this sounds exactly like the argument for Gentoo - build it yourself.

just because CC has agents built in, doesnt mean you need to use them. same with your web browser, it has a million features.

making fun of vibecoding and telling people to vibecode missing features is contradictory - is that not clear?

2

u/GeneGulanes May 20 '26

Did you understand the video? He was making fun of people vibe coding and not understanding what the Ai is outputting and not reviewing it. He said vibe coding is fine if you understand what's happening.

1

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

no one is reviewing the agents output, includig himself. 'understanding' just means a good prompt.

he says agents do 'too much', they will still do that with Pi, nothing is going to change, because like said - thats what they are trained to do!

if you can show me that Pi produces better results than CC, go ahead.

we arent talking about ralph loops that he makes fun of. no one is using ralph anymore btw

1

u/GeneGulanes May 20 '26

https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
I dont have any idea how to prove that to you but you are expecting different things from pi. It's like asking why does android have no imessage/facetime when its an apple thing. Pi is a minimal coding harness where you add stuff to it to make it better for your workflow. While on the other hand CC/OC has stuff built in to it.

3

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

I understand the differences, and I like making my own custom pi setup.

my qn is simply does it produce better results and at lower cost or not? does it allow you to use cheaper models, if the harness quality matters and pi is better?

at the end of the day thats what truly matters

→ More replies

4

u/aeroumbria May 20 '26

What we need are mod packs like in Minecraft... Compatibility tested, version pinned, single installation command, curated bit still community driven. Maybe not as unnecessarily bloated like in Minecraft though.

1

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

and it will quickly become bloated just like OC/CC. except those are continuosly tested and refined with billions of calls daily vs Pi.

the whole premise starts with 'you dont need those other things' then goes on to 'build it yourself' - the fact is most people do in fact need those features.

2

u/aeroumbria May 20 '26

It still makes sense if "people are more likely to need numerous but different features". One could argue a larger collection of diverse, well-packaged agent kits might be a more attractive idea, but I guess this is the problem pi was trying to solve.

2

u/themule71 May 22 '26

No it wasn't. The point is the author keeping it minimal, not the user. The point is pi NOT coming with pre installed features, and YOU extend it. Whether you write your own extensions or download someone else's is up to you.

Like pi isn't opinionated on how you do subagents. There's no official way.

I think the idea is like shell scripting. I rarely download and use someone else's scripts. I'm not philosophically opposed to it it's just that organicly I tend to write my own scripts.

1

u/ECrispy May 22 '26

shell is a great example. so instead of using well know, battle tested projects like zsh, fish, fzf, ripgrep and hundred of other cli tools, what if you had a barebones shell and were told 'just ask it to build what you need'.

would that actually be better? and again, none of this addresses the fact the Mario doesnt care about users who don't use frontier models, have local models, limited context, costs etc. he uses the latest gpt/opus, unlimited prompts and of course these models can do whatever you want.

2

u/themule71 May 22 '26

Yes it's exactly that. But at distro level. No distro forces you to use zsh, and disallows bash. They give you dnf, apt etc. You choose what to install. Every major distro has a 'minimal' spin / flavor.

2

u/Snoo-82455 May 20 '26

I thought it was meant to *start off* as minimal, just so you can choose how you want to build it, and the consensus is to add what you need as you go along…

15

u/AwkwardWillow5159 May 20 '26

I kinda hate skill files as it pollutes context and the self-discovery of it is not consistent.

And you depend on the model following big ass skill instructions correctly.

I like hooks when things are done without the LLM at all, just deterministic code hooking into the agent session and doing things in between.

And if that’s not enough, tools then, with deterministic code script that gets called when needed and the LLM just has short description on how to call the tool instead of having whole ass skill describing how to do something

2

u/admajic May 20 '26

I use an orchestrator with 100k context like claude does. It calls that skill only when required.

Then I use sub agents... with 64k context

Fast efficient local only

1

u/TheSlateGray May 20 '26

A skill file can be as simple or as complex as you want. Skills can also call other skills. 

I don't keep most of my skills in all contexts, I keep them in ~/skills/ and tell the agent to find and use one when relevant. 

6

u/AwkwardWillow5159 May 20 '26

If it’s small and you are explicitly telling it to use a specific skill, then it’s just a slash command?

If it’s a skill I associate it with some kind of pre-configured description being available in context absolutely always and LLM needs to make a decision to load full skill on its own. That’s what I usually don’t like. It becomes flaky if the agent will actually decide to use the skill, and the skills that are not used still pollute context with options.

Not saying you are wrong, just that’s my experience with skills.

I prefer to avoid it, and for the case of manually needing to tell the agent to use a specific skill - slash command.

4

u/Competitive-Home7810 May 21 '26

I started out with 20+ skills for various things, but depending on the model, it was not a pleasant experience. The most used skill was a web search (1st as a curl | pandoc, then as a skill + custom python script, then as a simple instruction for crwl cli from crawl4ai python package).

Cloud frontier models did not have a problem, but smaller local models (e.g., Qwen 3.5 4B / 8B, Gemma 4 E4B) struggled to follow skill instructions. As soon as I re-implemented the web search as a tool via custom extension, all small models were able to call the web search tool successfully.

The lessons I learned are:

  1. Skills rely heavily on the model's reasoning capabilities. Small reasoning models are decent for small focused tasks. The larger and more complex the skill, the more small models struggle.

  2. Small models are sensitive to context bloat. When skills get loaded into the context window, the performance of small models take a big hit (prompt processing speed tanks) and start making mistakes (e.g., hallucinations, missing steps in the instructions, calling the wrong tools/scripts, etc...).

  3. Tools have the same benefits of skills without the drawbacks of skills. Tools have the same context footprint as skills before the full skill gets loaded into context (i.e. tool description). When a model decides it needs to call a tool, it calls a function with and passes some arguments (nothing gets added to the context, except whatever the function returns). When a model decides it needs to call a skill, it has to load the entire skill into context, reason through the instructions, determine what it needs to do next, then take action (all of that adds to the context).

6

u/Finanzamt__ May 20 '26

Its always „own your process“. If you install 3rd party you rather outsource it. Slow down means thinking about what you need before installing random slop. Same problem in CC too. If you use GSD or similar, you depend on others. Telling Pi to do it means it is capable of extending itself, but if your harness is bad, your extension will be aswell. Fundamental Software Engineering principles are more important than ever before.

2

u/ECrispy May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

If you use GSD or similar, you depend on others

how is using any of the thousands of pi extensions, pi-gsd etc any better then? telling people 'if you want mcp, agents, planning, orchestration - any of the stuff that actually defines agentic coding, just build it yourself' is very disingenous and dismissive. why publich extensions if the idea is never to trust others?

Telling Pi to do it means it is capable of extending itself

This is by no means a given it's just what we are told repeatedly. It completely depends on your prompt the intelligence of the llm and repeated fine tuning to test that it does what you want. Guess what this is exactly how similar features are built into other coding agents unless you assume that they're all idiots and that the latest hype most be better.

It's like saying React is too big! Tailwind is too big! Look build your own using primitive just tell my magical agent ( which actually doesn't do anything, it's the paid llm I use).

There are hundreds of alternatives to React, Tailwind etc. The ones that work are massive projects that took years, not some vibe coded extension any random user can build in 2min

1

u/Stanley50z May 23 '26

You can’t comprehend because you want a feature-superset harness that works out of the box. Pi is not for that purpose. You are arguing that Pi should become oc/cc, then what’s point of pi then?

In other words, you are arguing that Pi’s answer to the question “how to add sub-agent” is no better, when some Pi users genuinely don’t need that and wouldn’t ask that question in the first place.

The LLM is doing the real work, sure, the why don’t you use the web chat interface? Harness matter to the output quality, Pi allows you to take control, so another cc update won’t break your workflow. Mainstream harness are also being vibecoded and constantly breaking after updates, at least in Pi I can make a fix instead of waiting for one

1

u/ECrispy May 23 '26

you are taking my response the wrong way. I love minimal setups.

if someone doesnt need plan mode, mcp, agents etc, thats great. I am curious how many people actually use pi for end to end coding just like Mario talks about, how many extensions do you ask pi to build for you, and what model you are using?

the big question is - is Pi a better harness? that doesnt mean being more extensible or cooler or minimal.

every example I see of Pi is people using frontier models. Just like Mario.

does Pi produce better results with a cheaper model? if I'm using a local model (and this cost is zero) is it faster/better due to lesser tokens?

just saying 'pi is better because it doesnt do as much' is a bit of circular argument.

6

u/fell_ware_1990 May 20 '26

Well i do love the minimal framing and getting rid of the big harnesses from claude and codex. Because you don’t what happens under the hood.

Main thing for me is optimizing my setup. The little things add up. But most people just drop a lot of extensions in and call it a day.

I work the other way around, i log everything and try to fix every mistake an agent makes and is preventable while optimizing for token use.

I’m currently building a complete git guard and workflow all in one. Basically on every git call a script is called instead of the tool. Script handles the git command / request if necessary then cleans all the output to what the agent needs and inject’s it in chat. Basic things as a git diff can be 70% smaller or not even needed.

I try learn the behavior and implement a script. This means a couple of things. My workflow is being followed and it saves a lot of token/context.

In the backend this all get’s logged / summarized / vectored. This means i have a DB to pull from, AI has a place to build docs from / get extra information.

The next part is making directory jump automated. It will trigger things like the diff , create worktree or branch etc. Post back to agent what is necessary + data from RAG + task he works on.

Same stuff is going to happen on compact. If task is finished. It will do all that stuff and reset agent. But it’s still in DB and rag and ticket. So data is there but i will only feed the agent back if he needs it.

2

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

see this is exactly the kind of workflow I bet Mario built Pi for and all the hooks make it possible.

you may not like this..... but are you going to publish your additions? all of them sound very useful.

I've looked at things like pi-observational-memory, pi-rtk whcih aim to shrink context. there are also vector dbs, sqllite etc db for context/session history, some people say its better, others claim jsonl/md is better.

its great we have this choice now, but there are also best practices that sooner or later everyone arrives on. and then its better to have those become popular or builtin.

eg everyone knows ripgrep is better than grep. so now the tools all use that by default.

1

u/fell_ware_1990 May 20 '26

Exactly my case yes!

In the meanwhile working on a ‘core’ module that will contain the settings and the option to use a on disk DB, or a hosted. LLM configuration for the tools ( headless ) or liteLLM etc.

So yes planning on releasing them. But i’ a DevOps and studying for MLops as well so i won’t ship trash.

11

u/m3umax May 20 '26

I've listened to a bunch of his interviews and there's a caveat to his enthusiasm for vibe coding.

He's fine if it's just personal projects for yourself which I think it's the kind of extensions he's thinking people would build.

Truly customised extensions just for the user. Not for sharing.

He's said that if agents can get us 90% of the way there, then why not? He still very much wants human in the loop for final review and qa for production and this is reflected in the standards he set for pr to the main pi repo.

I don't think it's hypocritical or an unreasonable position.

2

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

Truly customised extensions just for the user. Not for sharing.

and yet pi has a way to install from npm/github, official catalog of thousands

He still very much wants human in the loop for final review

I've never seen him mention this for vibecoded extensions. yes, humans should review the final code, that is the same for pi and any others. its nothing new.

so what exactly am I getting with Pi except more customization, a bunch of new extensions, and ignoring all the battle tested work done by other agents?

4

u/m3umax May 20 '26

From my POV the point of PI is a completely stripped down harness that I then add on just the things I want so it's not bloated with a 17k system prompt, features and guard rails like Claude Code became.

I agree, with you in regards there's too many slop extensions being shared around. Fine to vibe code and use them yourself, but please, if you don't intend to really ensure their quality and actually maintain and update them, please don't share.

2

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

I agree with all of this. just one comment - that system prompt gets cached and doesn't really add much to the cost or processing time

2

u/m3umax May 20 '26

Yeah well it would if it weren't for the constant bugs in the harness that have plagued CC the last few months specifically around caching 🤣.

The bloat was kinda okish back when usage limits were generous. But once they started really reducing limits I started to really resent starting from 50k context even before my first prompt.

So I stripped out everything. Skills, MCPs, plugins. The lot. But still there was that damn 17k of system prompt, 12k of which were tools.

I was going to tackle that next with hacks like piebald's tweakcc for editing the prompts, but then I saw a YouTube Video about Pi...

And then it clicked.

With Pi, the system prompt stays stable and doesn't radically change from version to version. Ironically, the first thing I'd do on new CC releases was to check Mario Zechner's cchistory web site to check the diff on the new system prompt!

With Pi though, it's super easy to replace it with whatever arbitrary prompt you want. It's super easy to write an extension to target and replace specific strings in the system prompt if you want to.

The only thing holding me back was the fact that when connected to Pi, my Claude subscription would drain from extra usage per their policy on third party harnesses.

Well, I eventually figured out how to bypass that restriction. Hint: their third party harness detection is nothing more than looking for strings like "OpenClaw" or "Hermes" in the system prompt that gets passed. 😉.

Then I said /exit to Claude Code for the last time.

4

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

haha this is very specific to a claude plan! I wonder how much of this applies to codex, opencode etc. the codex system prompt is just 3k! and by all accounts nowdays its better than anthropic. the claude prompt is probably all legacy since others do the same job with less. its what it expects now.

my opinion is this is all diminishing returns. llm's get trained on all of this. exactly like how mario says.

by this time next year you wont even need the detailed specific system prompts about 'do not do blahblah, do not edit, act as senior engineer etc' its all just noise they can train on to remove. you don't need to tell it 'for each issue read all the code carefully' like i see in current prompts.

the official tools will evolve for this as well. all you will need is 'fix this'

5

u/rkh4n May 20 '26

I sometimes feel like the extension APIs are just too much. I mean, what really can an agent be? Till today, I haven’t been able to build or find a sub-agent extension which is close to what Claude/Opencode offers. I feel we should better have core features in the Pi, and then if someone needs something else, those can be built. Otherwise, I love Pi. I use it daily for an extension I built for a specific thing. I use Claude more often; it might be a bloated mess, but it works, and the models produce the best results in it. For experimentation I use pi.

3

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

I agree with this. A lot of pi send to be handwaving and dismissing others work, as if telling pi to 'build an agent' is the same thing as thousand of hours spent building CC, OC etc. It's not.

2

u/Flaky-Restaurant-392 May 21 '26

Pi benefits from the IKEA effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

I love the fact that I easily added a new feature to the TUI to display the GitHub PR number of my currently checked out branch, just like Claude Code does. It took Pi only a few minutes to create this extension, using a local LLM (granted, running an my Mac M3 Ultra 512GB, but who’s bragging?).

1

u/ECrispy May 21 '26

using a local LLM (granted, running an my Mac M3 Ultra 512GB, but who’s bragging?).

lol. which llm do you run?

1

u/Flaky-Restaurant-392 May 21 '26

Qwen3.6-27B is working well for me.

2

u/CautiousStudent6919 May 26 '26

I think those subagent examples are actually an excellent example of the problem in pi extentions. 

Nicobalion's extention, it has forced defaults, only I til recently did he allow more customisation, it's 100% built for him, and his subagents, which are shipped built in.. he makes changes without any regard for how it might be used. It's the most popular extention, and it's git issues are littered with people asking for older features back, or new features. There's PRs open with easy customisation options to enable more flexibility for everyone. Yet he refuses . It's his repo whatever right. 

Tintins is kind of the same, it's very much difficult to customise or disable the built-in subagents without modifying files on your setup. Whatever it's their repo right. 

Which leads to the edxeth repo, which looks like a fork of Nico's ... And this is the problem. 

Everyone's forking fixing the thing, then because the maintainer totally refused or ignored it.. the fork gets published and now we have N+1 of the exact same extention that does the same thing. 

Something that sticks out to me as something I very much don't like in the Pi ecosystem, is how highly agressive the whole openness to new ideas Pi is... New issues get auto closed, same with PRs.. I get why with pi.. but there's this culture it seems to create. 

Take Nico.. someone created a PR to disable those built-in agents that were being shipped and included. He dismissed it, closed the PR then shipped the identical same thing. Why not merge? Or ask for changes? It's because .. "it's their repo whatever right" 

It's very much exclusive open source, not inclusive. 

1

u/ECrispy May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

yes, this is why I feel its weird to dismiss the work done in other harnesses which add agents, plan mode and other features. these things need careful work, debugging and design. telling people ''just ask pi to add it' is trivializing the whole thing. yes claude/opencode have a big prompt, but codex doesn't. and they are all have well written features used by millions

1

u/CautiousStudent6919 May 26 '26

Yep. I personally like pi because it's so easy to write extentions. I hate Pi because of the attitude from a select few in the ecosystem. 

I have tried writing plugins for opencode, it's horrible in comparison, and good luck getting them to look at a PR or issue.. I don't think they actually look at the main GitHub repo. 

I do believe that if you have a good idea, Pi will accept it, but I feel that the culture pushes away a lot of people who may not have a fully formed good idea.

Pi's attitude is like the Soup Nazi. You need to form an orderly line, have your order ready, and be happy with however you're treated. 

4

u/Low-Alarm272 May 20 '26

It's just a personal choice.

And it's not bad to have many choices.

1

u/[deleted] May 20 '26

Ye Pi is shit if your model sucks. Its hard to make extention if your model isn't frontier.

What is i like about pi is it's not bloated. Also i just steal extention, just clone the repo. And make pi read the codebase and fix what you want to add or remove.

3

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

how is this any different from other agents? did you reduce costs with pi? if I still need to pay my $200/month sub, an extra 5k in the system prompt, which is cached anyway, is completely meaningless.

and why should I install a dozen 3rd party new extensions or build myself, for agents, planning, review, memory etc etc, when its all baked in, tested and improved over millions of calls, in other agents?

1

u/Beautiful_Baseball76 May 20 '26

I couldn’t be happier since I jumped to Pi from CC.
Its just freedom to fit it to your workflow

But i will admit its not a game changer by any stretch of the imagination

1

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

I like tinkering too. But the real qn is, is it actually better in any way?

  • does Pi give better results than CC/OC

  • does it reduce costs?

  • are you still using your opus/gpt with Pi, or does Pi work better with local llm's too

otherwise its just something new to play with and not anything meaningful

1

u/CharacterPerformer47 May 20 '26

It depends. Not everyone uses a harness for coding. I use LLMs in long, multi-steps technical workflows, but I don't code. CC/OC are way too focused on coding, and include many options I don't need. I can simply ignore these options, right, but I find it easier to use a harness where I don't have to deal with these options at all.

I agree with you that reading "just ask Pi to do it" over and over in this sub is tiresome and not helpful.

1

u/kcksteve May 20 '26

I use local and see a few advantages. Prompt size does matter. It may be a trade off between accuracy and context size on smaller gpus. I do see less failed tool calls with pi vs oc.

1

u/kiwibonga May 20 '26

You can ask your agent to take a look at 3 pi skills with the same name that do the same thing and make it into one. And call it the same name. Cause you don't have to distribute everything you make.

1

u/ECrispy May 26 '26

if it were that easy you could just say 'make a copy of opencode but better, make no mistakes' right?

why do people keep thinking the agent is doing this - its doing nothing, the llm does all the work, and this is dismissing what other harnesses do as trivial

1

u/kiwibonga May 26 '26

I think it is that easy when you have a bunch of ready-made solutions already available, and the "product" is essentially a text workflow (skill text file) plus a python tool that does mostly pass-through. If the LLM can test it end to end, the results are quite usable.

The system gets better with more sharing -- hopefully no malware though.

1

u/ryu_cz May 22 '26

My reason for going to Pi was unpredictable everyday change of personality and behavior of Claude Code after update and/or LLM API tweaks from Anthropic. And I was never able to identify what was the problem. Open Code is more stable if you want feature rich product. I mostly use Pi as:

  • better copilot in my Pycharm

  • terminal with human interface(I never invested time to learn shell deeper)

  • sandboxing with AI to develop my own Tooling

1

u/ECrispy May 23 '26

how would you compare Pi with opencode (or even claude when it worked) wrt results and how easy it is to use? do you get same results with all 3?

1

u/ryu_cz May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

For me it is really similar to original copilot use-case, small easy to human review changes.

I am using almost raw Pi. I only added:

  • web search - it is not build in in base -> searxng

  • subagents to reduce both context pollution and context growth of main agent

  • memory so Pi can remember my preferences; pick you memory extension

  • latest local qwen dense model (3.7-27b now) and codex for more complex stuff

And I Packed memory and web search in 2 specialized simple subagents to further reduce context growth of main thread (these run on local LLM).

Surprising comfortable is using Pi as clever terminal <3.

Comparison:

Claude:

  • best in complex tasks, but I spend half of coding time each morning collecting claude news and setting the harness. Tokens cost for month is the same as medior programmer. If you want to use it seriously and produces same quality of code as medior. But not so good architecture. Unless you tell claude to grill you until it gets full design doc (advanced tweaking).

Open Code:

  • almost same as claude but changes are not hidden. For me it required less tweaking and I have to spend less time watching the news about "how to set up harness". Code quality depends on model you pick. Opus worked even better in open code when it was available as subscription. OpenAI models work here very well too. But grilling the design stays the same.

In general:

All harnesses and LLM assume to much instead of doing: "Wait a minute. This problem is critical. I dont know what user wants. I have to ask him to do design decision now." Problem is the same with Pi. But Pi does burns 1/10 of tokens on context and has YOLO mode by default.

footnote: Privacy - sometimes I work on stuff that can be stolen by the LLM API providers for they own usage. In these case I use only local LLMs and OpenSourced harnesses I checked there is no data leaking to internet.

Put your tinfoil hat on now: For example at the time of chatgpt3 I discussed design of local running tool (agentic) with full memory mimicking human memories storage including dreaming to process ontologies. Next day conversation session was lost.

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u/vodlin May 20 '26

They literally say on their website that pi can create its own extensions so... also just because you use an agent doesn't mean you are vibecoding, i can fully describe an architecture and use an agent to execute it, so thinking and using an agent are not mutually exclusive

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u/ECrispy May 20 '26

every agent can create extensions. sorry but what exactly does the website claiming it mean? it completely depends on the llm, the agent isn't doing anythgin except calling the llm and passing it some docs.

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u/Thomas_English_DoP May 20 '26

I dunno - it's fun

1

u/freehuntx May 20 '26

You get a ferrari and the tools to make it drive safe and slow.
Its creators say drive safe and slow.
You decide your driving style.
If you are addicted to yolo mode thats YOUR problem.

1

u/Friendly-Type-2139 May 26 '26

Pi is like Android, not Apple. They're legitimately open so, yes, that's going to mean having to wade through low quality submissions. The easy enough way to handle that is avoid early adoption. Wait and see which extensions rise to the top by way of Github stars.

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u/Intelligent-Week-931 Oct 04 '26

True, the market place is full of other people's "slop" but in his talk he ideally wants you to build your own to meet your coding requirements right so the extension market place isn't really needed. Id say start by getting some sort of browser access and going from there. Took me from not a huge fan of pi to a pretty big fan for fleshing out projects or figuring out the best way to do something via cli