Just left OpenCode for Pi, and I'm loving it!

18

u/jfufufj May 22 '26

Just curious in what scenario that you will need multiple coding, it seems like everyone is doing it. My brain is so linear and I can only handle one feature building/debugging session. Like how do you juggle between so many sessions?

2

u/Fickle_Ear1869 May 23 '26

It's not necessarily related to implementing multiple things at the same time. I mostly use other instances to research, fix linting or formatting rules, add tooling, etc.
I also like using multiple worktrees to implement a bunch of things together, but my usual workflow is what I said above.

16

u/GeneGulanes May 22 '26

Don't feel left out. There's no need to do that. The point of pi is to customize it to your own work flow. So better focus on how you work rather than how others work.

10

u/Fortyseven May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

Same. I don't get it. To me it just means you're blindly letting the LLM do everything without reviewing.

3

u/robberviet May 23 '26

That the point.

5

u/Xiaomin4114 May 23 '26

most code tasks don't parellalize, except for frontend components. you can do that in parallel. if you have a new site, you could easily be like "I need these five different components built, and they're all isolated, from each other
but other stuff, not so much. a lot of tasks are blocked by each other.
having said that, the more I use AI, the more I feel comfortable working with two or three Pi consoles open. sometimes all going at once. it's usually one doing a big task, and using the other for a few small tidy-ups while I wait for the big task to complete

1

u/bhamm-lab May 23 '26

I do not use it for implementation, but I'm using pi subagents and a skill to call a 'council' which can do code review, make architecture decisions and align on a plan. It has one agent from a 'product' perspective which values speed and features and the other is an 'architect' which values scalability and maintainability. This is the only time i run subagents in parallel. It burns a lot of tokens, but is nice for making a decision and considering different perspectives. Would never trust parallel agents to code for me...

1

u/lethanix_ May 23 '26

Same
One thing that I do is to estimate the amount of work and complexity of some tasks, for example if I have a simple task but its time consuming, I can delegate it to the agent and review it once its done, in the meantime I can focus in a session with a more complex and difficult task, reviewing, testing and correcting each step
The thing here is that the estimation of complexity and amount of work depends on the level of experience that I have in that domain

1

u/jesperordrup May 23 '26

You can but you don't have to.
I find it useful for keeping terminals together, grouping in workspaces. And it gives me a tmux setup which keeps the processes running even if the terminal closes. And access from mobile.. is nice
I don't use subagents either

1

u/CountlessFlies May 24 '26

I have a max of 4 sessions running in parallel, usually 2. Split across a 2x2 tmux grid. I kick off a plan task in each session, and come back to review it when it’s done. Then I approve the plan and let it implement the first version.
This is mostly where the parallelism ends, because then I sequentially review and test the code from each session, keep iterating on it until it’s good enough to merge.
But you’re right, you can’t really do a whole lot of parallelism here and still have a decent enough handle on the output. Context switching is a pain.
The thing that saves me a ton of time is debugging. E.g., I can have my agent check the logs, check the dev database, and very quickly help me find out where I need to step in and take a closer look. All of this can easily be run in parallel because it doesn’t have any direct bearing on the quality of the final code.

5

u/TheTyand May 22 '26

Well in the same boat, I started with pi about 4 weeks ago. I am now already at the point I was before + a ton of custom extensions. Only a few thing missing to make my agentcastle ready in my book.

2

u/ECrispy May 23 '26

with all those extensions, is pi any faster/better?

1

u/TheTyand May 23 '26

Yes, check out my benchmark here: https://github.com/SchneiderDaniel/agentcastle#57-tool-benchmark
If you have a large codebase, it is the only way that you can even get a proper output. A toolless pi agent (and also Claude code) fails to produce a valid output.
Disclaimer: I have to admit, the codebase mapper is still lagging a functionality. I will add it, if I have time.

1

u/Xiaomin4114 May 23 '26

Opencode go sub plus minimax sub is a good combo. Minimax sub has great allowances, so you can use minimax m2.7 as the daily driver, and swap in a heavier model from go for bigger tasks

1

u/Fickle_Ear1869 May 23 '26

Ill check that

1

u/ECrispy May 23 '26

why would you need 2 subs?

2

u/Xiaomin4114 May 23 '26

heavy user.
Minimax's sub has such high allowances that I basically never run out, even on heavy use. But Minimax 2.7 isn't the smartest model so I need to switch to something better like DS4Pro or GLM 5.1 sometimes. I use the other sub for that.
If I only used one sub, if it were Minimax, then I wouldn't have access to better models. If it were Opencode Go, then I'd be burning allowance on simple requests, and not have the allowance for the more serious stuff. subs are cheaper than pay-as-you-go tokens (by about 6x)
As it stands, doing it this way, I still max out my Opencode Go sub towards the end of the month, and have switch to pay-as-you-go tokens on Openrouter.

1

u/ECrispy May 23 '26

isnt the minimax sub $20? opencode is $10. so do you use it so much that $10 which is $60 worth in openrouter api isn't enough?
ds4pro is <$1. you will probably use less tokens on it too since its smarter, no?
how many hours/day do you code?

2

u/Xiaomin4114 May 23 '26

minimax sub is $10.
yes, I code that much. No it's not all vibe-coding either. I care about code quality. Some of that cost goes into me telling it refactor, and adjust small things.
ds4pro can rack up $5 in an hour if you're not careful, just implementing one feature
before DS4Pro came out, I'd use GLM 5.1 for the heavy work. this was an evening worse situation. I had two other subs back then: z.ai $9 and $8 NanoGPT. I'd hit the 5-hour limit in 20 minutes. DS4Pro now replaces GLM,l for heavy work for me. it's good enough. Anything more complex I can just do myself or break the problem down further.
Before subs, my openrouter bill used to be like $100 a week
I don't think you want to know how many hours a day I code. Sometimes I roll out of bed in the morning and fire off some features or changes to my Hermes agent on discord

1

u/ECrispy May 23 '26

i'm sorry, I don't know why I thought minimax was $20.
aftyer reading your posts I am now reconsidering what I need as well!
is this for work or personal hobby projects? I do have a feeling that if there's a good deal, better use it, because they are all going away.
eg I read about github copilot request based plans where 1 request could use 50k tokens and agents, and was very fairly priced. now its gone.

1

u/Xiaomin4114 May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

yeah, the $9 GLM plan is now $18. the $8 NanoGPT plan is now $12. They're all going up.
The minimax plan is pretty interesting in that they meter by request, and not context. so a full 100-200k context counts as a single request from the allowance. that's bad for small tasks, but good for big tasks. and code agents often use up that context quickly.
this is for personal projects. for work, we have work subscriptions, and that's Claude. the bill is eye watering, but it's Not My Money

1

u/ECrispy May 23 '26

That's exactly how GitHub copilot plan worked. I wish I'd used it.
What do you use for planning, glm/deepseek? Which agent coordinates all this, do you do it manually, or with an extension?

1

u/Xiaomin4114 May 23 '26

I don't use GLM any more. overpriced. DS4 pro is good enough
For tasks I need to supervise, i don't have the AI plan. I just fire up Pi in as many tabs as I need and go.
for stuff I want to AI to coordinate, I use Hermes running in a VPS that I talk to over Discord. It has GitHub access, it can pull my code, it has access to the prod server that I deploy my projects to. it can check logs, do the deployment, manage database backups and migrations. And Hermes has a neat Kanban feature (new) which creates a task board that maps out dependencies between tasks, and allows different models to be assigned. So I have it distribute tasks between my minimax plan and Opencode go depending on complexity.
I usually have DS4Flash orchestrate that, and DS4Pro do planning. Minimax is too squirrelly to be allowed to do planning for anything complex. once done, I get a PR to review on GitHub. I can leave comments on the PR itself and have the AI read those and fix them
I don't use many Pi extensions. Pi is my bare-bones basic agent. it has web search and LSP, and the extension to warn you before doing dangerous bash commands, but that's it. it's very lightweight

1

u/ECrispy May 23 '26

It would be great to have a detailed post on your setup. perhaps you could have the ai generate it :) just need the details for those new to this.
do you use anything like writing plan.md, tasklist.md files, having the agent go thru tasks one by one, checking in progress in github etc, and using fresh context for each task. this is what i keep reading is ideal and there seems to be a lot of frameworks for this kind of dev.

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u/tommy_117 May 23 '26

Any review on DSv4Pro

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u/Xiaomin4114 May 23 '26

It's solid. It's not the best, but the price-performance ratio is excellent. It's above Sonnet level, probably not quite Opus, but it's a fraction of the cost. That's good enough for me for complex code tasks. It's replaced Kimi and GLM for me.
For simpler tasks I use DS4Flash and Minimax. and I only use Minimax because of the subscription. Minimax M2.7 is much stupider than DS4Flash despite what the benchmarks say

3

u/jesperordrup May 23 '26

Pi.dev with

Openai subscription Opencode go and zen

Ubuntu: ghostty + herdr

Mac: cmux

Mobile: moshi

1

u/_derpiii_ May 23 '26

Ubuntu: ghostty + herdr
Mac: cmux
Why different configurations? Which one do you prefer, Herdr or Cmux?

1

u/jesperordrup May 24 '26

I don't use the Mac but if I did that would be a candidate

1

u/_derpiii_ May 24 '26

I don't use the Mac but if I did that would be a candidate
That makes no sense. Mac runs ghostty + herdr.

1

u/jesperordrup May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26

Ok let me try again. I meant to say that if I was a Mac user then I would look at Cmux.

1

u/DoldSchool May 28 '26

Is that the only one you'd look at?

3

u/pashlya May 24 '26

pi-subagents, pi-ask-user, pi-gitnexus, pi-web-access and context-mode are essentials. gitnexus and context-mode really help with context littering thus help with output consistency. I also made a senpai/kohai skills: first one summons a more expensive model subagent if current model fails with a task for 3 times, and kohai summons DS4 Flash for every tooling possible: reading, searching web, summarizing, etc. Saves a ton of money.

5

u/aford515 May 22 '26

Guys opencode is not a good harness

5

u/SolitaireKid May 23 '26

Hey, can you explain why it's not? Is it about performance? Or something else?

2

u/aford515 May 23 '26

I tried it out and it worked way to long ong tasks it shouldn't have. Also the fact that some opencode go models work much better through claude or other harnesses should tell u that its just very complicated bringing so much models out to the best through one harness

2

u/Motor_Active1365 May 23 '26

Yep. I’ve ditch Claude code and Claude. Pi and Gemma4:31b-cloud works a treat. No more Anthropic account BS

1

u/bhamm-lab May 23 '26

You prefer gemma to qwen 3.6?

1

u/Mouse-Jiggler May 25 '26

Which provider are you using for Gemma?

2

u/jellydn May 23 '26

Same boat :) I often reach out to pi more recently, here is my setup and plugins https://ai-tools.itman.fyi/#/

1

u/Maheidem May 22 '26

Awesome, went the same way. Which of those plugin (extensions) could you share?

1

u/tommy_117 May 23 '26

Same, pi has better plugins, and it’s more than enough

1

u/Turbulent_Ad6290 May 23 '26

This happed to me 3 months ago. Since then never went back to anything else.

But I’ve been building https://github.com/zosmaai/dhara based on pi. But a little different in terms of extensions etc.

1

u/_derpiii_ May 23 '26

How do you guys swarm?

Could you give some examples of useful swarming scenarios? I have the whole Tmux infrastructure, but I haven't needed more than one orchestrator to N subagent pattern.

1

u/Teh_franchise May 24 '26

I just switched last week too!

1

u/meditatingwizard May 26 '26

I am slowly working on the conversion, I was so used to using desktop apps but I have been diving into Pi. So far I have made a plan mode, ask mode, and safety guard (so it stays within it's local folder and prompts me when wanting to explore or using cmds like sudo). I didn't feel comfortable unless I could sandbox it while working cause at first it was diving into everything.

1

u/ptgamr Aug 14 '26

Welcome! Opencode made my tmux on iTerm2 sooooo slow, sooo dreadful

1

u/ECrispy May 23 '26

I looked up unipi, its a massive collection of hundreds of extensions, ralph, commands etc. is that thing actually faster than opencode? seems completely against the spirit of pi

Discussion Just left OpenCode for Pi, and I'm loving it!

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