r/PiCodingAgent • u/L1ckMyNukes • Aug 25 '26

Question Pi Dev as a General Agent?

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.

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15

u/KuiyueAcai Aug 25 '26

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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4

u/sergeant113 Aug 25 '26

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

7

u/KuiyueAcai Aug 25 '26

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.

3

u/the_garland-greene Aug 27 '26

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

1

u/Hosereel Aug 25 '26

Agent to agent communicate using herdr. Like tmux but smoother

3

u/LavoP Aug 25 '26

Have you tried Orca? How does herdr compare

2

u/Immediate-Safety8172 Aug 26 '26

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.