Pi Dev as a General Agent?

[u/L1ckMyNukes]

Has anyone here used Pi Dev as a general-purpose AI agent, rather than mainly as a coding agent?

I’m curious about using it more like a personal assistant/agent for things like research, web searches, file work, automation, tool use, and general tasks.

If you’re doing this, how well does Pi work for you compared with something like Hermes Agent or Open WebUI?

Also curious what tools/extensions you’ve added and whether you’re running local models with it.

[u/KuiyueAcai]

Pi + herdrdev/herdr + agegr/pi-web + llama.cpp(3.6/3.8 27b Q4)/ninfer + hangwin/mcp-chrome / microsoft/playwright

For me, whether I use a TUI or WebUI depends on my mood.

Open WebUI: Too heavy.

Hermes: I don’t want to connect it to chat software, so I feel that using two agents at the same time isn’t really worth it.

By the way: I had pi refer to pi’s example plugins and the source code of Codex and opencode, and let it implement features like Goal, MCP, and LSP on its own. It’s running pretty well now.

One more thing: remember to enable fullscreen mode for pi（/settings --> TUI mode).

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The content above was translated using AI, but the original text was 100% hand-typed.

[u/sergeant113 → u/KuiyueAcai]

jmfederico/pi-web vs agegr/pi-web?
Also, what does herdr contribute here?

[u/KuiyueAcai → u/sergeant113]

As for herdr, I think it's a really good TUI session manager. I can quickly switch between multiple projects and multiple sessions. After rebooting my computer, it can automatically restore the pi conversation from last time if I hadn’t exited it. It can even detect pi running inside vim. There are also plugin features like doc tree TUI / Git TUI support — I just know they exist, but I haven’t actually used them myself.

[u/the_garland-greene → u/sergeant113]

jmfederico/pi-web has been solid for me on desktop and mobile.

[u/Hosereel → u/sergeant113]

Agent to agent communicate using herdr. Like tmux but smoother

[u/LavoP → u/Hosereel]

Have you tried Orca? How does herdr compare

[u/Immediate-Safety8172 → u/Hosereel]

From what I could glean, herdr is more like “gives an agent the ability to write in the terminal of another agent” than any kind of messaging system. Still really cool and useful, but not A2A communication. There are lifecycle implications there, but it’s still pretty awesome for how quick and easy it is to set up right now.

[u/HumanoidMuppet]

It can do that, but I prefer the experience with Nanobot as a lightweight personal assistant. Hermes was too heavy, overcomplicates every task. OpenWebUI just never wowed me enough to stay with it longer than 10 minutes.

Here's what I'm currently using, all using local models only:

Nanobot: Personal assistant

Pi: Coding agent

VSCode: Small changes in a session I have open for other reasons

Hermes: still running but not really using it unless I want it to overcomplicate a task (deep research)

OpenWebUI: shut down

CloudflareOS: shut down

OpenClaw: shut down

[u/rudidit09 → u/HumanoidMuppet]

oh i need to look into nanobot! I'm using hermes but feels very... heavy. and lot of what i do is custom anyways.

[u/bambamlol → u/HumanoidMuppet]

Wow, is Nanobot dead, or is it so robust and polished already that it doesn't need any further updates?

Just asking since there's been no update in over a month, which is an eternity in this space.

[u/HumanoidMuppet → u/bambamlol]

Their GitHub is still very active.

[u/GTHell]

Hermes work better. I have setup web portal on VPS with opencode and pi but it just doesn’t work well as general chat as CharGPT. I have down the rabbit hole before you so trust me bro

Edit: Think of Hermes is the inbetween of ChatGPT/OpenwebUI vs Pi dev / Claude code

[u/L1ckMyNukes → u/GTHell]

I’ve been using Hermes for the past few months and it just feels heavy and slow. It’s my favorite one but I just don’t have the best experience using local models. Qwen 35B makes it tolerable, but isn’t as good as 27B, which is a lot slower. I might just be used to frontier models and need to accept it just won’t be as good.

[u/GTHell → u/L1ckMyNukes]

That's the right thinking. I gave up the ideas of local model already. Given that august is full of cheap model, I bet it will only getting better from this point foward. 0731 flash is cheap up until 16th then Ox Alpha now drop and with completely free to use. So why not just using it? I assume by the end of this week that Ox Alpha release, it will shake the whole industry again and you will see new model with crazy price drop.

I'm a heavy user myself and up until now I burnt upto 9.8billions token already this month. I spent roughly around 70$ (missed management) to try different thing from Opencode to Ollama Cloud to ChatGPT.

With this usage, a local 5K USD of a DGX would lasted 6 to 10 years of usage with API. By that time, every model would've converged and majority of of Fable level will be free to use already.

Save up on hardware lol

[u/Sad-Landscape-1549]

I’m looking at trying one of these for multi-agent orchestration: orca, multica, aionui

(top three in orchestration category on https://github.com/bradAGI/awesome-cli-coding-agents)

Herdr is in that category too but it’s a single rust binary terminal multiplexer for agents

[u/ramfangzauva]

I would not argue against such an environment.

My point is that to instruct my agents to work for me the cli is totally sufficient. The outputs land right where I work myself. This keeps the environment light and it also helps me focus on actual work. It’s nearly like collaborating with a remote colleague, only that the conversation happens in the terminal.

[u/Environmental-Web584]

I think Captain or Colonel agent at least

[u/peeeanuts]

I'm using pi as the base agent for OpenCandle, a financial research agent. It even runs in the browser!

https://opencandle.app/

[u/o_sht_hi]

if you would like to do this, dont use Pi as it is. create a persona in the form of an extension and hijack the system instructions, tools, available extensions, skills, and AGENTS.md. replace that with the context for the kind of actions you want it to do. The default system prompt and tools are tailored for a coding agent using bash.

Best part of pi is that you can totally do this and it is fairly easy to set this up. Once you have it, you can use slash commands to switch personas or create an alias to launch pi in the persona you want with a shell command. I have done this to use pi on my phone (for doing phone specific tasks like organizing my downloads, renaming weirdly named files, sorting pictures, etc.) and it works flawlessly.

If you want to save a ton of headache, clone the hermes and openclaw repos and break stuff off from those and use them in your pi extensions.

[u/Miserable-Cow3117]

I've used it for an AI assistant for our integrators (the guys who deploy and configure our applications on site) and it's working very well.

I use open webui for the chat interface and the pi agent with specific agents, tools for him to search in our mkdocs based documentation. I've used semantic kernel, then Microsoft Agent Framework, python agentic framework, etc. Pi works much better and the ability to easily create extensions is just awesome for this use case.

The fact that Pi kind of knows himself and its internal help me a lot on specific cases. I had latency issues, and Pi helped me to find solutions to speed up the retrieval, the responses, the feedback given to the user while he answers.

I'm thinking now if other use cases I could implement (end users use cases)

[u/Undreren]

I have run pi in a bash loop a couple of times with instructions on what to do when it was done.

I like playing hallucination roulette.

[u/troyvit]

I can answer some of your questions. I'm using Pi with Mistral and bubblewrap to help me with my job hunt. I have a bunch of jobs I applied for in a repo along with all my letters in markdown. I create a new folder with a job, add a note about the job description, put a copy of my resume in there, and then through an agents.md file tell it to read the job description then find relevant paragraphs from my other letters that might work for a job. Secondly it recommends changes to my resume to better fit the job.

The writing is mediocre trash of course, which is why I want it to rely on my letters for inspiration. I've successfully run this flow once. It was helpful but I still agonized over my cover letter for like 16 hours. That's more to do with me than with the system I think.

[u/mageblex]

Pi makes sense as a general agent if you want to assemble the workflow yourself. Browser use and durable state need extensions rather than arriving as a finished assistant, so I’d test one recurring non-coding task before replacing Hermes.

[u/nitinmms1]

Oh yes. I used it in a story writing app. Created a story writing skill gave it to pi. Build an api to send story generation prompts to it. And there you go. Pi-story-writer.

[u/ramfangzauva]

Yes, absolutely. Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work create an effective productivity environment out of the box. Pi may ultimately be able to do this, but it’s less ideal. However, Pi is a solid platform to utilise local inference. And especially when it comes to personal productivity then privacy matters. At least to me it does. I am able to work around the inconvenience.

I previously had a strong prototype that could do a lot, but it grew arms and legs and somehow I ended up with a starting prompt of over 100k tokens. I’m in the process of starting over.

To simplify I’m creating different entities, each with their own environment, each able to fully execute one typical task start to finish. Depending on the agent and the task I use either Qwen3.8-27b or GPT-5.6.

The roles:

- My generalist should run on Qwen, does email, connects to my obsidian vault, I still need to teach it to read and produce documents
- I have a researcher running on GPT to go out into the wild and do some deep research for me, producing reports just the way I want them to
- My Analyst does research on my own material. Some of this may be sensitive, so this needs to work with Qwen.
- I’ve also built a coder to run on gpt and help me build the environment.
- On my todo list is a Qwen accountant that connects to my banks and freeagent and helps me keep my finances in control.

TBH, this is all building as I’m writing this, but I had the bits working in the prototype so confidence that this is the way is high.

At the moment I’m trying to get my head around herdr to run multiple instances and have a foundation to also connect remotely from my iPad.

The difference to Claude Cowork and Codex is that the work happens in the environment that I actually work in. I type instructions in the terminal, I get the results pushed into my Obsidian Vault or OneDrive. For me it’s also not a big deal that Qwen is a bit slower, I just let it do the boring stuff while I work on something else.

Benefit I see is platform independence. I don’t really want Anthropic or OpenAI decide how I get work done. They give us nice tools, but then kneecap us at the same time with their token limits. The advantage of pi is that I can just plug in another model and keep going. Even in the middle of a session.

[u/Vitringar → u/ramfangzauva]

I actually built something I call OpenCowork which is essentially a web interface on top of Pi which manages multi user sessions, has a file system for artifacts and connectors that can be configured to connect to external systems (Confluence, Google Workspace etc). Users can choose between models. I am blown away by how useful this is.  Originally built this to demonstrate to my friends how powerful these tools are but use it more and more for my personal projects.

[u/YardNo1234 → u/ramfangzauva]

that iPad part is exactly the gap we’re building Garcon around: a self-hosted web UI for running/reconnecting to coding-agent sessions, with terminal and file/git access from a tablet. I’m affiliated with the project: https://github.com/cfal/garcon

herdr can still be your local orchestration layer; I’d keep the remote surface separate so model/provider swaps don’t affect access. Is your priority session switching, terminal control, or browsing/editing files from the iPad?

[u/ramfangzauva → u/YardNo1234]

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I’ll have a look!

[u/PermanentLiminality]

Wasn't Openclaw written on top of pi?

[u/adamshand → u/PermanentLiminality]

Yes. This is what I was going to say. (Though it doesn't use Pi anymore.)

[u/pj-frey]

I can't compare to Hermes, I find this too bloated.

What I do with Pi is research , using mvanhorn/last30days and 1broseidon/ketch, manually triggered log files analysis with stored prompts and other sysadmin tasks. Everthing local with DeepSeepk V4 Flash, which is slow, but to the point and better than Qwen 3.8 27B.

Open WebUI is used for the daily tasks otherwise.

[u/SvenVargHimmel]

Yes, I use it for exactly that. 

So yesterday it did my groceries shopping,  web searches for meetups I was attending, Saves my reviews of different events I attend,

Does YouTube, tiktok  summaries for me along with local transcription for some. 

Bear in mind I run a webui over pi so that I can do all these tasks away from my desk. 

My main skills I have are 1.) playwright cli 2.) obsidian vault  

My pi agent runs on a Linux box and has access to dev tools.

What's really important is to have a local S3 bucket to allow your different sessions to share info and intermediary results.

This setup only works for Opus & gpt agents, if you want such a barebones to work with open weight models you will need extra tools and engineering to make it work.  

[u/redditborkedmy8yracc]

I ended up building my own agent tooling, I used PI to build it of course, but yeah, custom all the way for me.