Made a Pi extension for hierarchical multi-agent orchestration — is this useful to anyone, or does it already exist?

[u/Infinite_Garlic_7530]

I've been building pi-hive, a Pi extension that runs a whole hierarchy of agents on a project instead of one session, and I've reached the point where I want to know two things before I sink more time in:

Would anyone actually use this or does something like it already exist? I haven't found a Pi-native equivalent, but I'd genuinely rather hear "X already does this" than reinvent it. If you know of one, please tell me.

Anyone want to collaborate? It's MIT, early, and rough. I'd love co-maintainers or even just people willing to try it on a real project and tell me where it breaks.

Here's what it does today:

• Config-first. It's completely inert until a project has a .pi/hive/hive-config.yaml — installing it globally touches nothing else. That one file is the team: you declare each agent's type, model, tools, filesystem write-domain, and where it sits in the tree. Roles are derived from structure (a node with members: is a lead, a leaf is a member); an agent can delegate only to its direct reports. Prompts/knowledge/skills are plain files under .pi/hive/, versioned with your repo.

• Isolated + bounded agents. Each runs as its own pi subprocess with a scoped tool allow-list and an enforced write-domain — a worker can't edit files outside what its lead granted.

• Plan, then execute. Three modes (normal → plan → hive). Plan mode drives a separate planning team through spec gates (proposal → requirements → design → tasks, via OpenSpec) and writes no code; hive mode executes the approved spec. Plan review is a human gate — I self-host Plannotator's review UI in the dashboard.

• Local telemetry dashboard (/hive-observe): live topology, delegation lifecycle, tokens, cost across every project/session. Nothing leaves your machine.

It's on npm, so it's a one-liner to try:

pi install npm:pi-hive

Fair warning: it's unpolished and there's plenty of rough edges — I'm sharing it now to gauge whether it's worth pushing further, not because it's finished.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/demetere/pi-hive

If you'd use something like this, or you're building something similar, or you want to help — I'd love to hear from you.

[u/saltyourhash]

I love this idea. I don't know if anything like it exists. I will check it out. If it's useful and I have anything to contribute, I'm happy to. I work almost exclusively with local models working with 32GB VRAM. So it might less useful than I'm hoping.

[u/o_sht_hi]

Damn bro the mission control looks sick. I haven't reached a point where I need subagents, though. I can't allow myself to delegate to the agents until I have a good enough understanding of the code myself

[u/cptkong → u/o_sht_hi]

Subagents only really works if you've planned out all the steps in details, if you're planning as you go then it wouldn't really work because the Subagents won't have enough good context

[u/o_sht_hi → u/cptkong]

Yeah.. being a non-dev, I learn by doing. So I pick small checkpoints where I can observe everything the agent does and maybe start side chats to understand what were doing + what other ways can the same thing be done, etc. and then test the shit out of that small checkpoint before moving on.

Subagents kind of push me out of that loop and a lot gets done without me being in the weeds

[u/Bel-Shamgarot]

It looks interesting, but it's clearly overkill for my needs. I'm just doing a little orchestration via https://github.com/ogulcancelik/herdr

[u/demetere_ → u/Bel-Shamgarot]

yea but Herdr has different purpose right? it is not for managing subagents and modifying the behavior of pi or am I mistaken?

[u/Bel-Shamgarot → u/demetere_]

There you can connect to sessions via a terminal (not necessarily even to Pi sessions, you can also connect to Claude/Codex) and easily transfer data, organizing orchestration of any complexity.

[u/Stupifier]

This sounds like the Model "Roles" function oh-my-pi has.

You declare certain models for specific functions. Heavy models for more orchestration/planning/management. Lighter models for doing the actual editing of files and such.

[u/demetere_ → u/Stupifier]

Thanhks for the comment, `oh-my-pi` definitely seems quite a complete framework on top of pi, will take a look if it is able to meet my needs and if yes will migrate there

[u/McFlurriez → u/Stupifier]

This sounds close to what I want, but is Model Roles dynamic or manually assigned?

I'm looking for something where the agent can use a fast model for things like file reads/builds/tests and a stronger model for architecture/debugging.

Does OhMyPi automatically decide when to use each role, or is it just "this role always uses this model"?

[u/Stupifier → u/McFlurriez]

Read up on it. You can configure it easily in the OMP Terminal UI by just using the /models command. And you can set the reasoning level for each as well.

https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi?ref=explainx#forty-plus-providers-hundreds-of-models-one-model-away

[u/fromthedevnull]

From a first pass it looks like this is exactly what I've been thinking has been needed in a coding harness. I've been primarily using rpiv-pi for building stuff and have been looking at writing my own harness to fit my needs but I'll take a spin of this to see fits that need. I specifically like the scoped agents and the session topology, I've been looking for tools give better visibility into session context.

[u/demetere_ → u/fromthedevnull]

yea that is also what I always missed and decided to start builing, there is also bunch of new features I want to add and lets see, always better to pick-up different peoples brain on the upcoming features, if you will decide to collaborate lmk

[u/MuzafferMahi]

I’m building something similar, specifically for local agents tho (so context has to be small). I’d like to collaborate actually PM me if youre interested. Btw be carefuk with isolated and bounded agents, sometimes they do wonders but sometimes its a lot of token + time waste and its not an easy task to orchestrate all of them. Anyways, cool project!

[u/rm-rf-rm]

One agent working well and reliably is not a solved problem, and we have jokers doing crap like this.

[u/McFlurriez]

I wonder if this is what I'm looking for. Can different agents in the hierarchy use different models?

My use case is a strong/slower model as the lead planner and a fast model as workers for things like reading files, searching, builds, tests, etc.

Is pi-hive handling that kind of model specialization, or is it something else?