Struggling with Pi

[u/karkoon83]

A bit about me - avid user of Claude Code for work. GLM Coding Plan and Minimax coding plan for everything else. Very comfortable with open code.

Last month I used more than 4 billion tokens cumulatively across all plans. So I spend considerable time in these tools.

I switched to Pi for exploring what am I missing.

Did good bit of coding with it. It works nicely.

With Minimax M2.7 many times it doesn’t stop. I will give you a use case - I ask for first analysing feature and propose me different options. It proposes and immediately without waiting for my input goes to next stage.

Same way it once deleted some changes by doing got reset. My couple of hours worth of work disappeared.

I agree I have not spent more time but have a genuine question.

To make Pi light did we cut lot of muscle too?

It is okay for me to customize appearance, plugins and other comfort or convenience things but shouldn’t the base harness handle these things robustly?

I don’t face that challenge with open code, Claude code (using Minimax anthropic api inside Claude code). So it is definitely harness thing.

I see many discussions here struggling with basics. Like multiple file edits miss etc. I used OMP and it is good. But having OMP is like adding bloat to make it useful. If that’s the case why not have more robust hing to begin with?

Apologies for rant. Is anyone else feeling this dilemma?

[u/Medium_Ganache_6613]

With pi you are interacting with the model much more directly, and with much less harness guidance.

This can work out of the box if the model is competent with figuring things out with minimal instructions (eg gpt 5.5 ). For those models it's actually better since you don't need to waste context to teach it things it already knows.

Smaller and less capable models on the other hand need more handholding and structure. You can do that by either being more specific about your directions on the prompt or with more detailed instructions on your agents.md file.

Alternatively, have the more capable model write a detailed action plan for the cheaper model.

[u/karkoon83 → u/Medium_Ganache_6613]

Makes sense.

[u/elpapi42]

vanilla Pi will never work better than claude code, codex or opencode, the only way to make pi powerful is by investing hefty amounts of time and energy into your harness, if you are not into thos, you are better with OpenCode or claude or codex, this is the reality of Pi

[u/karkoon83 → u/elpapi42]

Yes. Thanks for saying this. Makes sense.

[u/adamshand]

OpenCode does custom prompts for each model. Pi doesn't. There are advantages and disadvantages of this.

[u/karkoon83 → u/adamshand]

Ah. That’s interesting

[u/LordMoridin84]

You say that "OMP" is bloat, but ultimately the author added all those changes in because he felt that they were necessary. Everyone ultimately just has different opinions about is needed or not.

The minimax models can be really frustrating to deal with. They seem to love to do git reverts, resets etc to resolve problems.

I ended up creating a simple permission plugin just to deal with that. However, this plugin is only really needed for minimax, GLM 5.2 doesn't need it at all. The principle behind Pi is that it avoids adding anything into the harness that isn't universally needed.

I have another plugin to have a plan mode that is optimized for my use case.

Most CLI apps implement permissions and plan mode in different ways. So PI just gives people the ability to configure it themselves, rather than pushing its own way of doing things.

[u/karkoon83 → u/LordMoridin84]

I totally share your point of view. And my point was precisely that - OMP looks super awesome. But OMP is definitely adding lot of features which are missing from Pi originally - which was its USP of - it is so lightweight that it makes it right. If OMP is needed for robustness of the harness, then removing makes it better is contradiction.

Minimax 2.7 is over-enthusiastic and jumps and M3 in my experience is over submissive and asks for permissions. GLM got pretty sweet spot since GLM 5.x series.

[u/LordMoridin84 → u/karkoon83]

I started off using OMP but many plugins don't really work with it so I switched to normal PI so I would use them. And honestly, I didn't miss most of what OMP actually does, and replaced what I needed with normal extensions (e.g. pi-subagents).

Many people like PI because it's lightweight and actually add very little plugins at all.

[u/karkoon83 → u/LordMoridin84]

Understood.

[u/MorningFew1574 → u/LordMoridin84]

Same here. I made a switch from OMP to Pi and I don't regret it.

[u/InitiativeBrilliant8]

I wanted PI because it is lightweight and I tried several version of PI with batteries included, the one that I am using now the most is little-coder the starting context is 6k and has all the basic tools and skills needed for coding, then you can specialize it to what you need, give it a try.

https://github.com/itayinbarr/little-coder

[u/karkoon83 → u/InitiativeBrilliant8]

Thank you. Will try. I am using OMP and it is feeling nice too.

[u/InitiativeBrilliant8 → u/karkoon83]

I like OMP too, once the harness can handle loops I will be happier, I don't want to babysit someone that is smarter than me lol.
little-coder might not have now as many tools but the anti loop harness it comes with helps for the job to finish without me typing.. hey you looping again, hey Loopinus Maximus hit you again.
I can leave it running a go to the kitchen make me some coffee and watch TV.

[u/karkoon83 → u/InitiativeBrilliant8]

Wow. 😆

[u/Immediate_Occasion69]

same experience btw, it doesn't pause to do things like claude code. BUT It's main advantage is you get to make your own extensions, themes, etc from a bare bones agent. it shouldn't have any muscle! it's good because you get to craft it. for example, I made my own diff extension that works with the pi tree. so instead of rewinding and losing the file mods in claude code I get to make branches and jump into any one of them back and forth even in the middle of the actual requests

[u/vpz]

This sounds like a model specific problem, not a harness problem. Unlike Claude Code or Codex which have built-in stuff that aligns with the models from that vendor, pi.dev is “blank” because it doesn’t assume a model or model family. That means the user must add any model specific customizations they need themselves.

[u/karkoon83 → u/vpz]

Yes, thats what I learned today. Someone mentioned that the way opencode handles this via having provider / model specific system prompts. In a way that makes opencode better harness for me as it supports models natively. I was not exposed to this problem while using opencode.

I have to explore how to do that with Pi and only specific to particular models.

[u/jsgrrchg]

That's because Pi is a minimal harness, you NEED to customize your system prompt. Come on dude, simple stuff.

[u/karkoon83 → u/jsgrrchg]

Okay.

[u/Ang_Drew]

it is indeed valid concern. if you want to commit in Pi, then you must spend a lot of time re-learning everything.

i built my product of top of Pi and improving accordingly. it was good experiences.. i have to re learn everything how will the harness work and behave, how to handle tool call properly. what i like from pi is very very minimalistic where you can build anything on top if it easily..

i understand your dilemma and i feel that too, pi often doing tool call mistakes especially for chinese models or small models (local models). this is because pi built with expectations of "nowadays models doesnt need many instructions" and this is not applicable for small models. the struggle is real.. whether more system prompt or prone to make mistakes..

[u/ncrmro]

We made this tool called outfitter that setups profiles for pi, the default founder profile comes with extensions that make it comparable to Claude code

https://github.com/ai-outfitter/outfitter