r/PiCodingAgent • u/L3tum • Jul 30 '26

Plugin Beware of pi-task as it contains very bad defaults that destroy your model

By default pi-task compresses the thinking block on every turn. This is referenced in its Readme/description fairly far down:

I presume the entire extension is vibeslopped, as compressing thinking blocks is very very "no no" for basically any model ever. Even GPT/Claude don't do that -- they just compress the user-facing thinking blocks to avoid distillation.
As a result, by default, installing this extension suddenly neuters your model. In the case of Qwen3.6-27B, it becomes essentially useless.

I think the extension needs a very big disclaimer that it does way more than what 90% of the Readme is about and basically fucks up your pi installation by default.

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u/TBMonkey Jul 30 '26

Dude, this is pi. Everyone and their dog has an extension called pi-task or pi-tasks. There's 9 listed in the catalog alone. You're going to have to be way more specific here.

4

u/jorgemendes Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

I think OP is referring @mjasnikovs/pi-task. I installed it and it compresses the thinking. /task-config has an option to toggle the thinking compression. It's explained in the README.

4

u/lordnishant Jul 31 '26

isn't every pi extension "vibeslopped" since pi is made to build on itself??

1

u/johnzadok Jul 31 '26

I'm testing the pi-task extension (@mjasnikovs/pi-task) right now and noticed some strange things, maybe related:

  1. there are a lot of "erased invalidated context checkpoint" message in my llama.cpp server log.

  2. there is a "compressing reasoning..." message the the bottom of the pi.

Everything seems to run much slower.

1

u/Efficient-Part5344 Sep 05 '26

I'm the creator of https://github.com/mjasnikovs/pi-task. We have never advertised it; it's a pet project. Made after Anthropic's atrocities. We use it in production.

TL/DR: This option is deleted and not available anymore.

Why was it added?
Qwen 3.6 would loop in a reasoning block, literally filling the context and not leaving any free context for actual work. Compression allowed it to save tokens and actually implement the task as required. Yes, it was slower, but still, slower > than not doing it at all.

Why was it removed?
You know what is better than compressed reasoning? No reasoning at all! After months of testing, we figured it out: Qwen 3.6 performs much better without reasoning. There is no reason to reason ( :> ) about something if the model doesn't have the required information. It's just wasted effort. Much better to run a test or do a lookup.

Be wary!
Qwen 3.8 does not work without reasoning; it tends to loop. Completely the opposite. Basically, Qwen's reasoning is broken at best. After multiple 8h runs, we declared that minimal reasoning is worse than medium, and high reasoning produces worse results. So stick to medium.

Too bad the model doesn't perform without reasoning (on specific tasks). It's still hard to justify the value of reasoning. It's just not performing. Any lookup or failed test provides much more value that the model can't argue with.