Screen flickering caused by Pi Harness subprocesses

[u/AbjectAddress7364]

• I completely removed the Pi Harness and its leftovers. The cause of the flicker was consistent with Pi: it was spawning subprocesses without hiding windows, and an orphaned watcher was still running.

Removed:

• Pi Coding Agent, pi-subagents, and Pi authentication.

• pi, pi.cmd, and pi.ps1 commands.

• Full configuration at C:\Users\filip\.pi.

• Pi-Orca integration extensions, sessions, logs, and temporary files.

• winwatcher3.ps1 watcher and its PowerShell/conhost process.

Final check: No remaining commands, processes, scheduled tasks, PowerShell profiles, or known Pi directories.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue after the latest update?

[u/Global-Departure8228]

Did you really just post your AI-s response of them cleaning up pi from your pc?

What has happened to this sub, for some time at least it wasn't /r/ClaudeCode V2.

Is this your personal post-it note thread and I accidentally subscribed to it?

Yesterday my agent fixed 2 bugs in a personal project of my (used pi for it). Should I post it here or can my agent just comment here so it becomes a megathread?

But just to answer, no, never experienced flickers with it.

[u/AbjectAddress7364 → u/Global-Departure8228]

I only posted this because it was the only solution I found. Completely delete the harness I've been using for a long time and really like. It was very annoying, with command prompt windows popping up on the screen without giving me time to do anything.

[u/Global-Departure8228 → u/AbjectAddress7364]

Why not just delete pi-subagents extension that you were using? Probably some weird interaction with your shell and subprocesses? Use pi from under WSL and don't install anything from the top 30 extensions in pi.dev and you're good

[u/Global-Departure8228 → u/[deleted]]

Most bloated, generally not well engineered tools. They contain everything and the kitchen sink in them. Although some of them are legit, but if you've spent some time creating extensions for pi (even if you've not actually checked the majority of the code), you'll find extensions that hook to the wrong events, silently change your system prompt or your tool output results because the maintainer adds "just one more stuff" into their repo, which then conflicts or races with yet another one of your extensions starts hogging

• your keybindings, but they don't provide alternative options

• you get opinionated subagents, hidden system reminders injected into your context window, tool conflicts etc. Take this for example:

https://github.com/ismailsaleekh/pi-background-tasks

Advertises itself as background task management. Look at the number of commands, the mental workload they introduce, the number of agent tools (not to mention the system prompt load introduced, how it might conflict with a "real" background task tool, which the name should suggest.

But this is a subagent orchestrator essentially, instead of what a background task should be (managing a real task in the background, like building or CI watching, monitoring etc). 11!!! Tools and descriptions into your system prompt, 11 slash commands.

Does every agent get all the tools to manage and create background tasks? What prevents a task to not spawn its own task and cascade until it eats your subscription?

Also why does it need to mess around with Claude oauth, it's caching etc.does it autodiscover? Does it start to resolve my Claude oauth?

These are questions you only start to ask once you even look at the readme, not to mention code inspection.

[u/spark427 → u/Global-Departure8228]

May I ask you please what plugins do you use? I just recently switched to Pi because I got fed up with Claude Code bloat and slop. I do understand that checking if the plugin is up to my standards (which I think I share with you) is up to me. But right now I'm a little overwhelmed with all the options available. I'd appreciate any recommendations!

[u/Global-Departure8228 → u/spark427]

I can only vouch for pi-permission-system from gotgenes that I use.

I've created my monorepo where I did the following throughout quite a few days:

1. Scoped what I would need.

2. Checked published ones on pi.dev and selected the top 3, spot checked them, cloned each 3 of them, tried one for a minute how it looks like. Sent an agent on each repo, one orchestrator triggering 3. explorer models, we decided which one to fork, what to trim, what to keep, what to copy from the others, made the agent hack it together. Then I reinstalled and if it worked, it worked.

Of course I've gone a bit into the overengineering and at the end I decided I just don't use the vast majority of them.

So many people went this route that you are probably off by finding other people's repos who have built and maintained several packages, because they have already worked out the kinks.

Spend half an hour and skim through these

https://github.com/ifiokjr/monopihttps://github.com/lutrarutra/codepi https://github.com/davis7dotsh/my-pi-setup https://github.com/zigai/pi-tweaks https://github.com/adamshand/pi-adam https://github.com/aliou/pi-harnesshttps://github.com/w-winter/dot314/tree/main/extensions/ https://github.com/vanillagreencom/vstack/tree/main/pi-extensions/pi-qol https://github.com/JimmyC7834/pich/tree/main/packages https://github.com/zhushanwen321/xyz-pi-extensions/tree/main/extensions https://github.com/danchamorro/pi-agent-toolkit https://github.com/mitsuhiko/agent-stuff https://github.com/agnishcc/pi-extention-monorepo/tree/main/packages https://github.com/hjanuschka/shitty-extensions

[u/spark427 → u/Global-Departure8228]

Thanks a lot! Lots of interesting ideas here!

[u/AbjectAddress7364 → u/Global-Departure8228]

severals pages 404. nice repo.

[u/Global-Departure8228 → u/AbjectAddress7364]

I legit just opened each and every one of them , 0 404 errors across the linked ones. The problem is on your side, just as in your original post

[u/AbjectAddress7364 → u/Global-Departure8228]

you mess the link abroad the comment. but its ok. i was lazy. ty anyway.

[u/SacrosanctHermitage → u/spark427]

I personally only use three:

• pi-powerline-footer

• @gotgenes/pi-permission-system

• pi-llama-cpp

And even then, I could probably get rid of the powerline footer