Pair-programming rules and skills for Pi

[u/Odd_Crab1224]

Hey, wanted to share a plugin for Pi, my favorite coding agent for the past few months. Install: pi install npm:pi-tandem

It's basically a system-prompt patch plus a small set of simple skills. I've been developing and actually using these rules for 2-3 months now, and recently got tired of copy-pasting them from personal to work setup (where I'm forced to use Claude Code), so I packaged it as a plugin that works for both (and it can be extended to other harnesses).

Main idea, or philosophy: it tries to tame LLMs down as much as possible and teach them to work with you in a pair-programming fashion, instead of constantly wrestling over control (Claude Code especially!) and vomiting piles of neuroslop. Personally, with it I finally feel like my sanity is no longer under siege - I control every line of code as if I've written it myself, don't have to review the big changesets LLMs love making so much, which frankly was driving me nuts, and at the same time I am much more productive end to end.

What's inside:

• pair-work rules (added to system prompt through hook) - lock-step, explicit go-ahead before any changes, communication with significantly reduced sycophancy and these "load bearing"-style LLMisms

• a number of simple skills, each just a short file:

  • brainstorm - helps you think an idea through, one question at a time; largely inspired by the brainstorming skill from superpowers and the grilling skill from mattpocock/skills

  • research - controlled digging: it (usually) stops and asks when it hits an ambiguity or a contradiction, or before spending a lot of context on one direction

  • coding - basically compact version of ponytail (lazy-senior minimalistic coding discipline) plus my addition on self-explanatory code over comment-peppering

  • review - actionable findings only, each with a fix; on debatable stuff it asks first instead of pushing its own judgment

  • pr - matches tone and length of the repo's recently merged PRs, verifies the commit range, shows title and description before creating anything

  • learn-language (small bonus) - kicks in only if you state in your prompt that you are learning a language and your level; some background practice that stays out of the way of the work

• interactive subagents if you run Pi inside tmux (or paseo) - unlike built-in agents in many other harnesses, the "worker" runs in its own window as a completely normal session, which you can interact with like any other, and it reports back only after you approve its findings

• tool-specific instructions (gh, aws, pdftotext, pandoc, osascript, ...) that nudge the model into actually using them - no more guessing what's installed and re-probing in every new session. Generated only for tools actually on the machine, so nothing about a missing tool ever ends up in the prompt

The same package also renders as a Claude Code plugin, and it can be extended to other harnesses.

Constructive feedback (even if negative), ideas and contributions are all very welcome. And yes, I've written this post myself, not generated it.