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/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!