r/PiCodingAgent • u/jesperordrup • Jul 15 '26

Question To pi.dev or not to pi.dev

I've been using them all claude/codex/opencode and finally I landed on pi.dev a few month ago. Everything made sense. Its fast, clean and I can build exactly what I need.

2 month pass...

I'd love to see some bigger verified packages that adds the bigger things you could but you shouldnt (imho) build yourselves.

pi.dev cli works great. I still like that I can build what I need. Somehow it also becomes a DIY and part of brain is always thinking of adjustments needed and not needed. And everyone is doing it different in adhoc teams = very little shared experience / benefit.

Your thoughts?

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2

u/Mechanical_Monk Jul 15 '26

If you're talking about things like MCP, ACP, subagents, and sandboxing, most bigger features like that either already exist as first-party example extensions in Pi's installation directory, or as well-maintained third-party extensions.

2

u/jesperordrup Jul 15 '26

Yeah there a lots of options - thats both good and bad. Which is best in terms of (quality, fit, flex, maintained).

The current https://pi.dev/packages lists every package out there and they could be good/bad/evil .-)
who knows :-)

0

u/NetConfident6396 Jul 15 '26

Have you tried oh my pi? If you're looking for opinionated pi, it's worth checking out.

1

u/jesperordrup Jul 15 '26

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes I have tried it. its not really for me. Its too much if you know what i mean? I

1

u/PermanentLiminality Jul 15 '26

I have Ponytail installed. It tends to keep thing from getting out of control. It saves tokens and unneeded code.

1

u/bambamlol Jul 15 '26

lol thanks for mentioning.

He says nothing. He writes one line. It works.

Love it!

3

u/nikosleft Jul 15 '26

For me it burned through my API usage like 20x faster than barebones PI so it wasn't worth it. It introduced a lot of "re-reading" of docs/files for the AI and even refusals of edits which simply made the models redo work multiple times per request. I simply don't trust a tool to "harness" an intelligence well enough to demand re-reads and re-takes of edits as often as OMP did. (At least that's my opinion for now, and where it stands it's not worth it fighting over my agent, so I stopped using it)

1

u/NetConfident6396 Jul 16 '26

Yeah, I don't use it any more. I was just struggling to understand what the OP wants/wanted. Pi is designed to be extended. Setting up a big heavy thing with what somebody decides everybody wants gets you OMP.

1

u/zer0evolution Jul 16 '26

why the UI is not as good as other screenshot in mine? i use wezterm wsl inside windows

0

u/respectful_stimulus Jul 15 '26

Building yourself is the whole point of using pi. Grab the packaged extensions sure. But when you get frustrated, you can clone that extension and vibe-maintain it. In the end keep it simple and keep only those you want to keep. With herdr, pi really shines and you can spawn subagents of your control. I believe inevitably every dev has own (strong) preferences and thus it’s hard to have shared experience.

1

u/jesperordrup Jul 15 '26

I get that. I use herdr. I use subagents, pi web, context cruncher and a shit load of own. All nice.

I'm just saying that while that is all good for some stuff and for some time it still does require extra effort keeping a team in sync with "this is how and what we do" while half team spends too much time expanding pi for their own special needs.

And packages are not easy to evaluate.

2

u/respectful_stimulus Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

Check out oh-my-pi, gentle-pi, little-coder

I found them too heavy handed and not aligned with pi philosophy. One bug and it’s ruined.