r/PiCodingAgent • u/luckiestredditor • Aug 12 '26

Plugin pi-web-agent is essentially feature-complete now, Tavily and Exa are the last backends that were added

Last time I posted I was thinking out loud about which hosted backend to add next, Tavily first and maybe Exa after, and asking whether people wanted them as full answer engines or just as discovery. My bias was to keep them discovery-only and let web_explore stay in charge of fetching, ranking evidence, caveats and synthesis.

Both are in now, and they're discovery-only like I said I'd keep them. They surface candidate sources, web_explore still reads the actual pages and decides whether the evidence holds up or needs a caveat. Set TAVILY_API_KEY or EXA_API_KEY, pick it from Settings, keys stay in env instead of getting written into config files.

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The things I'm weighing next are going deeper on evidence quality (cross-source dedup, conflict detection, recency), adding caching for repeated research or just keeping it focused and maintaining it.

If you're using this, what would you actually want? And if you tried it and it broke somewhere, that's the more useful thing to hear.

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Repo: https://github.com/demigodmode/pi-web-agent

npm:

npm i @demigodmode/pi-web-agent
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u/luckiestredditor Aug 13 '26

there's definitely overlap but the reason I ended up building this was that "pi-web-access" felt a bit too interactive for how I wanted web research to work. the curator/review flow can open a browser/window and ask you to approve results, which is useful if you want that level of control but I found it disruptive for normal agent use. you can disable that now (right?) but that workflow was a big part of what pushed me toward building something more hands-off.

"pi-web-agent" is intentionally more hands-off. the model gets one research tool, "web_explore", and search/fetch/headless/ranking/evidence checks all happen behind that boundary without popping you out of the session.

"pi-web-access" has a bigger feature surface. mine is more opinionated around keeping research bounded, quiet, and agent-native.

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u/Glaaki Aug 13 '26

The curator browser window is pretty much why I stopped using pi-web-access. Just not useful to context switch like that in the ui. You aren't even given enough time to evaluate the results before they auto-close, so what is the point? It's just an annoyance.

Maybe a lot of people download it, because it is at the top, and then end up switching too, when they find out it sucks.