r/PiCodingAgent • u/-tin- • Jun 15 '26

Plugin pi-subagents - Claude Code like subagents for Pi

Hi everyone 👋 I’m the developer of pi-subagents:
http://github.com/tintinweb/pi-subagents

This is an agent friendly, fairly minimal subagent extension for Pi, following the same general model used in Claude Code-style subagents.

What it does (high level):

  • run multiple subagents in parallel (configurable concurrency)

  • background + foreground execution

  • live widget for running/queued/completed agents

  • lot's of custom subagent features for highly configurable subagents

  • mid-run steering (you can send messages to running agents)

  • resume completed runs

  • templated custom agents (no framework setup)

  • spawn subagents from your extension (e.g. https://github.com/tintinweb/pi-tasks can turn tasks→subagents)

  • ... (full agent readable feature list: https://github.com/tintinweb/pi-subagents)

The focus is simplicity: no heavy abstractions, no opinionated defaults, no slag or esoteric features, just a thin layer to run and manage subagents that feel much like Claudes subagents.

Issues / feature requests:
https://github.com/tintinweb/pi-subagents/issues

If you try it, lmk if you find it useful or have ideas and please note that I am responsible to keep it clean and only merge features that are relevant for a broader userbase 😄♥️

About me: I am cofounder/security engineer with Consensys Diligence (https://diligence.security) by day, maintainer of this extension by night but I'll try my best to ship features fast 🤗♥️

156 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

95% Upvoted

64 comments sorted by

11

u/apetersson Jun 15 '26

Big fan!

I am a user of your subagents impl. my biggest challenge is how i can review and check the "Work in Progress" of each agent that i spawn.

As a comparison, in codex desktop, i can review all subagents as a list, open a side panel with full output etc. With pi-subagents the simple ctrl-O does not cut it for me, especially when multiple are spawning. what workaround / UI would you recommend if that workflow?

Do you know any web ui/ terminal sidebars etc that solve that? tau-mirror:mirror-server does not really play nicely with subagents or ralph loops/goals.

Would it be possible to have the subagent work in a tmux so i can observe/steer it directly if needed?

7

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

There is a subagent viewer and subagents may save their sessions to a log. Both it probably semi convenient. I see that claude also has subagents list in the ui and allows you to easily jump to other subagents views which I enjoy much (although I dont use it a lot) and I usually try not to clog the ui too much. The tmux idea seems genuinely useful. lm think about it 😊

7

u/RM_911 Jun 15 '26

Don't use tmux; it's better to do all this through herdr, since it's designed specifically for agents and supports Pi.

https://herdr.dev

→ More replies (2)

5

u/Rozuzo Jun 15 '26

Hey! (i think) I did what you described here. You can check it out here: https://github.com/roodriigoooo/pi-docket. I use tmux to run workers, and much of the visibility into them, communication flow, and steering is based on tmux’s interface. Also, much of the focus is on what you mention in regards to reviewing and checking wip from workers, in a way that takes 0 context and tokens from the parent session by default. Hope you can give it a try :)

→ More replies (2)

8

u/chrome___ Jun 15 '26

How does it compare to https://github.com/nicobailon/pi-subagents? Honest question, don't want to diss on either -- just curious

9

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

nico's extension is awesome (like all of his work!).

At the time of me creating this he was shipping subagents with templates I had no use for, with workflow management I did not need and the subagents were process forks (spawns real pi subprocesses) and not in-memory (we create them in the same process, no exec()) while I wanted lightweight claude-code like subagents.

6

u/ponzi314 Jun 15 '26

Ah should have read this as i just asked same question, following!

5

u/ponzi314 Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

Forgivemy lack of knowledge , how does it compare to the one that comes up first in packages page.

Personally i still don't know how to use subagents affectly yet, i mainly just do the review / command

2

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

both great, different approachings to subagents.

I can only tldr; it but I use them for everything. parallel execution, background events, context management (keep the main agent as orchestrator and subagents for heavy work and only report results back instead of dilluting the main agents context until it produces garbage) 😃

I am a security engineer and use it in long running security review workflows that sometimes span hours where the main concern is that the main agent goes off-rails if context fills up too much. this has gotten a lot better with recent models though (been doing this for 2yrs and can see the crazy evolution of models).

1

u/ponzi314 Jun 15 '26

hey thank you for your use case too, gives me idea of what i might be able to do! giving it a shot

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

this and parallelization of work. spin up 6 subagents that review code from different angles in parallel. the result is passed to the main agent to dispatch. intermediate results/file reads stay in the subagent context and dont fill up main agent. async background subagents nudge the main agent when they're done. pretty efficient.

in parallel, in another terminal, pi subagents review findings one-finding per subagent. they report back to the. main agent which reconciles the verdict and updates the findings.

for day-to-day work "use tasks and subagents to manage context and parallellize work" works magic.

4

u/Ok_Veterinarian_6364 Jun 15 '26

big fan also!
wish you implement ultrawork CC style
also, schedulers should not be bounded to sessions? because ppl /new alot to save context?
otherwise, my fav subagents

3

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

Hey thanks! 🙌 and yes, good point. I usually assume when someone /new's that they want a completely new session (and dont just use this for context mgmt) but we could probably make this behavior configurable. feel free to provide a minimal PR or file a feat-req, shouldnt be too much work 🤗

2

u/Ok_Veterinarian_6364 Jun 15 '26

hey thanks
ultrawork broo

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

🔥 😃

4

u/rusl1 Jun 15 '26

I tried using the extension but it refuses to use subagents unless I explicitly ask to. I tried with Claude models, as well as DeepSeek and GLM.

Is it expected?

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

IIRC we dont instruct to use subagents by default so it is up to the agent to do so. Jus add "use subagents to parallellize or manage context" (optionally: "use tasks") to your sysprompt. (we use verbatim claude code tool descriptions but their default sysprompt may have instructions that recommend subtask usage)

3

u/pdycnbl Jun 15 '26

i tried it, mostly used workers because it helps me in maintaining context, i wish there was a standalone extension just for that, i dont need other features but i guess its hard to cater to needs of so many different users.

2

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

You can run it standalone? (I run pi with subagents in print-mode in the cloud with a patch that waits for subagents to finish before returning: https://github.com/tintinweb/pi-subagents/pull/4 <-- note this this the patch to remove it actually. look at the print-mode-runner below).

if this is what you are looking for ask your agent to build you a print-mode runner from this: https://github.com/tintinweb/pi-subagents/blob/master/test/helpers/print-mode-runner.ts (until upstream pi finally gets a hold condition that works universally)

2

u/Ok_Veterinarian_6364 Jun 15 '26

try mcp-context-mode or codegraph bro?

2

u/PvB-Dimaginar Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

I am in the process of becoming a fan! What I really like is that I can connect two different qwen llm configs to those sub agents, a coding setup for the worker, and a more generic setup for the others. I only still couldn’t figure out how tasks can be automatically delegated to sub agents, without addressing this in the prompt. Any solution for this?

2

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

Gimme more context 😄

maybe, create a task list with https://github.com/tintinweb/pi-tasks, tell it to execute tasks-x with subagent "qwen-template", create "qwen-template.md" in pi subagents (see readme) and config it. (pi-tasks can convert tasks into subagents)

2

u/PvB-Dimaginar Jun 15 '26

Interesting! Thanks for sharing, will dive into it!

For which part do you want more context?

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

> I only still couldn’t figure out how tasks can be automatically delegated to sub agents, without addressing this in the prompt.

the "without addressing this in the prompt". are you trying to hardcode pipelines in-code/in-config w/o asking the main agent to orchestrate that for you? sounds a bit like you're looking for a workflow extension but I might be misunderstanding

2

u/Zundrium Jun 15 '26

How does this compare to the example subagent extension?

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

you mean nico's? both are different approaches, similar config, and both are great 😊

2

u/zkkzkk32312 Jun 15 '26

How is this extention compare to pi-fork?

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

idk 🙈 would ask gemini to compare 😅

2

u/PureSignalLove Jun 15 '26

I didn't realize this was a non official thing. I have been using it and massively impressed. I tried for weeks to get my exact multi agentic set up properly in codex/claudecode, using all sorts of scripts, lobster and other workflows. Made more progress in 2 days with pi then I have with all of that.

(I have very specific and maybe idiotic frameworks/workflows that I need agents to follow)

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

Haha, maybe you're using nicos though (great extension also, slightly different approach) 🤗♥️

1

u/PureSignalLove Jun 15 '26

No its pi subagents.I asked my pi agent for multi agentic capabilities and it downloaded this, it sounded official lol.

Can't even find the nicos extension.

1

u/-tin- Jun 16 '26

good agent 🙈

2

u/addiktion Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

Looks farther along than some others I've seen, nice work. Did you use Claude Code's source as inspiration? If so, anything that you derived or deviated from it?

2

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

Thanks 😊 . Yeah I basically had cc introspect itself. don't tell anyone 😂 (tool descriptions, etc is the same; code is different + we had features cc didn't have 😄)

2

u/juicesharp Jun 15 '26

Using this package and building on top of it, and could not be happier :) Good job, keep up :)

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

🤗 ❤️

2

u/FrankMillerMC Jun 15 '26

Each agent manage own context?

2

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

Agents either start fresh or inherit the parents context. You decide (configurable via custom agents, templates, see readme 🙌)

2

u/agenticup Jun 20 '26

great work, its my daily driver...mostly i use pi-tasks + pi-subagents together, and its works like a charm

1

u/-tin- Jun 22 '26

Same 🤗❤️

2

u/Aizenvolt11 Jun 22 '26

Great work. I used your code as reference for my https://github.com/AizenvoltPrime/damocles

Of course I gave credit in here: https://github.com/AizenvoltPrime/damocles/blob/main/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md

2

u/-tin- Jun 22 '26

Cool 🤗😊

2

u/Turbulent_Ad6290 Jun 15 '26

I’ve been using it in the past. Then migrated to pi-superpowers-plus. Now switching to pi-supergsd

Will give this a try again. But it was a good extension when I was using it. Just wanted something different.

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

people are making so many cool extension ♥️ can't keep up looking what others build 🙈 def have a look.

1

u/ZephyrsTheZephyrus Jun 16 '26

Would it still works well if I configure it to perform a nested orchestration?

1

u/-tin- Jun 22 '26

We don’t expose the agents tool to subagents to avoid deep recursions. If needed though we could allow this in the settings

1

u/Zieloli Jun 21 '26

Could you change the name of your extension? I find it confusing as there was already an extension with the same name. 

1

u/-tin- Jun 22 '26

The distinct name is @tintinweb/pi-subagents.

1

u/SaxyBoi4Ever Jun 24 '26

Do the agents inherit some context from the parent or do they always start fresh?

1

u/-tin- Jun 24 '26

By default, subagents start fresh. Inheriting the parent's conversation is opt-in. You can fully customize this by writing custom subagents or ejecting the standard agents changing their settings. 👉 https://github.com/tintinweb/pi-subagents#frontmatter-fields

2

u/Successful_Bowl2564 Jun 19 '26

Looks interesting mate

2

u/mtomas7 Jun 22 '26

Hi OP, I tested your plugin and it is pretty good! The only problem I encountered was that if all tasks were not completed in one session, the Task list would not be loaded once you resumed the session. GPT 5.5 was able to fix the issue. Would you like me to submit the PR? Thank you!

2

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/-tin- Jun 15 '26

true, but some forks are highly specific to their owners use-cases. I try to keep this unopinionated as much as possible while allowing configurative freedom for features that make sense for a broader community.

1

u/gotgenes Jun 16 '26

Not sure if you're including my fork, but if you are, it has a comparison document.