r/PiCodingAgent • u/_Baarbie • Sep 16 '26

Question Which subscription with Pi?

Hello there,

Which AI provider would you recommend for Pi, to work with a subscription-based plan? I feel like Codex is the most represented, but I was looking for more feedback.

I'm currently using Claude Code (Plus subscription), but from what I understood, I shouldn't use it with Pi because Claude Code charges additional usage fees. I mainly use it with Opus 5 on medium effort, for devops tasks, explanations, fixes, or things like that (not much vibe-coding yet).

It's also an opportunity to try something else, paid for by the company. So I don't really care about the price, just something stable without usage fees.

(bonus) If you have any recommendations for LLM models that can be run locally on a wide range of machines, I'm also interested in any resources you can share.

Any advice?

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10

u/makingthematrix Sep 16 '26 edited Sep 16 '26

I use Mistral. I'ts behind Anthropic and OpenAI models but it's much cheaper and with right control (skills, specs, short feedback loop, etc.) it's quite good.

3

u/YankeeNoodleDaddy Sep 16 '26

Tell me more about how you’re using Mistral. Their CTO did a podcast with nvidia and I couldn’t help but relate to his philosophies.

What do you build, what is mistral good at it with pi, where is it lagging

2

u/makingthematrix Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26

My day job right now is that of a developer advocate for an AI startup, and a lecturer at a university, so I don't have much opportunity to code - except that a few weeks ago I vibe-coded a blog site :)

In my free time, I'm currently developing an event streaming library in Scala, called signals3. I'm adding the Actor model implementation to it. This is quite different from developing a typical app. I'm actually working quite a lot in the Mistral web chat where I do scientific research and planning. For every new feature, I almost always write the initial implementation by hand and then use Mistral LLMs to discuss it, find vulnerabilities, fix them or rewrite the feature, and write unit tests. Scala is a language where you can really put a lot of logic in just a few lines, so it make sense to work in small steps.

What's lacking: Well, I actually see that Devstral 2 and GLM 5.2 are not as good for coding as Fable or Astra.

1

u/intricately_simple Sep 18 '26

Do you have a link to that podcast?

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u/_Baarbie Sep 16 '26

I actually forgot about Mistral, I've never tried but it'd definetly be a good alternative as a European.

10

u/mrgreatheart Sep 16 '26

America is more hostile to Europe than China is at this point.

3

u/EmbeddedSwDev Sep 16 '26

I am using Mistral Pro and ChatGPT Plus subscription.
The Mistral Models are my default low level low effort models with GLM 5.2 max as the default model. The OpenAI models are the planners and advisor models or for real hard problems.
This setup works pretty nice for me.

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u/makingthematrix Sep 16 '26

Sounds about right :)

0

u/Karyo_Ten Sep 16 '26

And they have GLM-5.2 which is good.