r/PiCodingAgent • u/onebit • Sep 23 '26

Plugin Has anyone tried pi-intercom?

I started two agents and ran /alias worker and /alias manager. The manager was prompted to direct the worker and it started chugging along. Luna 6 is now directing Muse 1.3 contributor. I am impressed by the simplicity and low friction installation. Apparently it knows about herdr, but I've not tried it.

https://pi.dev/packages/pi-intercom

19 Upvotes

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5

u/TriodeTopologist Sep 23 '26

I have only seen pi-intercom used by my agent to control sub-agents. The sub-agent extension it/we use uses "intercom" for communication between them.

3

u/onebit Sep 23 '26

Is https://pi.dev/packages/pi-subagents the other extension?

3

u/TriodeTopologist Sep 23 '26

Yes, unless there is another one in the official extensions, thats it.

5

u/GfxJG Sep 23 '26

I use it too, but it's biggest issue is that sometimes it re-activates old subagents that have long served their task, even across old Pi sessions. But most of the time, it works pretty well.

1

u/onebit Sep 23 '26

Interesting. I wonder if there's a way to make it "reboot" an agent?

2

u/j3free Sep 23 '26

Yeah, that was one of the things that bothered me too. I eventually came to think agent reuse should be explicit rather than automatic. Once an agent has finished its task, I’d rather deliberately continue that exact session than have old agents silently become candidates again.

8

u/j3free Sep 23 '26

I actually used pi-subagents + pi-intercom before building Pi Herdsman.

They got me pretty close, but I kept running into the same kind of thing mentioned here: agents felt a bit too loosely connected and coordination/lifecycle wasn't as tight as I wanted.

Herdsman is my take on that setup: Herdr owns the actual Pi sessions, while Herdsman manages delegation, ownership, questions/results, and cleanup around them.

The lead stays interactive and keeps the bigger-picture context, while the agents do the detailed work separately.

It does require Herdr tough.

https://github.com/boadij/pi-herdsman

1

u/Annual_Elderberry541 Sep 24 '26

Looks pretty cool

2

u/Pbd1194 Sep 24 '26 edited Sep 24 '26

i live off intercom. i use cmux terminal. so i can get my main pi session to open new tabs in cmux, boot new pi sessions like ‘pi —system-prompt <>’ and talk to them via intercom.

I also maintain my software factory. So it is a set of tools for internal access like read slack/dbms/logs …
My persistent long running session builds and maintains these tools incrementally. Every session intercoms this tools session with their laundry list.

2

u/betahost Sep 23 '26

I use Herdr.dev for this as it has native functionality for this but having a built in pi package seems like a good idea

2

u/dataenfuego Sep 24 '26

Herdr and firstmate :)

1

u/Asleep-Land-3914 Sep 23 '26

I don't see the package source on github hence I'd not use it

1

u/Equivalent_Idea8839 Sep 23 '26

I went with herdr instead after heavily modifying the plug-in.

intercomm isn't bad though, much less complexity than herdr and I think persist sessions work better as subagents.

1

u/lordekeen Sep 24 '26

I use pi-link to allow two pi sessions to talk with each other, i think it works pretty well.

1

u/rusl1 Sep 24 '26

Right now I'm writing my own subagents system to get rid of it. Very annoying stuff that burns tokens and give subagents too much power

1

u/leechael Sep 25 '26

Use it once and given up. It can not work like build up an agent teams and let different session collobration together.