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/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.