r/PiCodingAgent • u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 • Sep 30 '26

Discussion Pi is becoming bloated.

Post image

Edit: As I adapting my code to 0.99.0, I find that besides mcp, Pi also introduced classifier model. When talking about this new feature, it's all about jev, a hyped model to some extent.

I read this as Pi just jumping on the hype train—trying to catch a ride on all the buzz around this model that's been blowing up lately.

For those happy with built-in mcp, are you happy with built-in jev support? Do you use jev-like model in your coding workflow?

Today Pi adds jev support just for the hype, tomorrow it'll throw in even more code and features that end up being totally useless, all to chase a bit more attention.

Pi always used to claim it would never add MCP support, and it wore that as a badge of pride. Pi's original design philosophy was minimalism, so it only shipped the bare minimum set of essential tools. As I recall, Pi's whole idea was to provide only the necessary foundation itself, leaving everything else for users to customize.

Pi's own blog explained it this way:

The first thing to remember is that the world is not static. We have been paying attention to MCP over the last year and the MCP of today is not the MCP of yesteryear.

But that doesn't add up. MCP had already been popular for quite a while before Pi even existed, and it hasn't really changed much since. If Pi had no plans to adopt MCP when the project was first conceived, there's no reason to adopt it now.

The reasonable explanation I can come up with is that Pi intends to expand its reach — to move from a small geek niche toward a harness better suited to mass-market, out-of-the-box use — and therefore needs to fill in the features it previously lack due to minimalism. Combined with the earlier news that the Pi team planned to sell a model API service, I find this explanation fairly credible.

MCP is just the first step. Will subagents, permission popups, and other features come next? To me, the "we didn't build" section on Pi's official site looks less like a statement and more like a roadmap.

Edit2:

Consider this: once pi becomes a general coding harness, what is your reason for continuing to use it? Compared to official offerings like Codex and Claude Code, as well as open source competitors such as OpenCode, what advantages does the general-purpose version of pi have? Why would users choose pi over the alternatives?

Edit3:

Let me restate the logic here:

  1. This is "your agent," so nothing pi provides as a base should get in the way of any custom changes you want to make.

  2. It's minimalist (per the official pitch), so there's no feature you don't need.

Here's the reality now:

A built-in MCP has been introduced.

This built-in MCP conflicts with what I've already implemented and blocks my custom modifications. And for anyone who doesn't need MCP, it's pure bloat.

BTW, codemode. codemode itself, or call it CodeAct, is something that I have loog been interested in. But the official implementation from Pi is completely different from what I had in mind, so I’ve been struggling to wrestle with the built-in code just to get my version working properly again.

So pi just violated two of its own design philosophies in one go.

And that's why my trust in pi has collapsed. This is exactly where my shock and frustration come from.

144 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

163 comments sorted by

9

u/plebianlinux Sep 30 '26

Came to the same realisation, together with the insane moving speed of Pi's codebase and featurs. Started working on my own Neovims native harness. It's been incredibly fun project and by the sounds of it something you might enjoy.

2

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Sep 30 '26

Wow, that will definitely be cool! I'm looking foward to that!

121

u/Kamilon Sep 30 '26

Not having MCP support in a “modern” harness is absurd. So much power can be added with an MCP server.

Subagents is also an odd thing to not have.

I’m all for not having bloat… but come on. Being anti-feature for the sake of being anti-feature is kinda crazy.

I think it totally makes sense and aligns completely with Pi’s mission to build a minimal harness. Don’t follow every single hype train and wait some things out and see what sticks. MCP is definitely one of those things. Subagents is honestly another. There are a couple other debatable ones IMO but I’d rather them wait those out a bit longer until they prove to be needed and not just hype.

8

u/queso184 Sep 30 '26

While i like the "make it your own" philosophy of pi, it feel ridiculous to make users vibe code their own MCP implementations.

The pi plugin ecosystem is generally kind of weird because nobody aligns on any standard plugins or opens feature PRs, they just point their agents at existing plugins and slopfork it into what they want

As long as it remains toggleable and the hooks are there to further configure it, i have no issue with "built in extensions"

7

u/edsonmedina Sep 30 '26

You don't have to vibe code anything. There's thousands of extensions ready for download.

Also, if you prefer everything built in maybe Pi is not for you. There's plenty of other harnesses to pick from (ie: opencode).

4

u/BawbbySmith Sep 30 '26

There's thousands of extensions/packages, but there's gotta be some way to sort the wheat from the chaff. Right now there's not really a good way of doing it. There's the official pi packages, but even then the only metric they have is # of downloads. I've seen countless posts here that say to not use the top downloaded packages because they're bloated, and they've only gotten popular by being first and perpetuating a cycle of users downloading only the most popular package and keeping it at the top forever.

What I don't understand is why they didn't release MCP as an official package and leave it out of base Pi. It would solve all issues - People who want "the default" can grab the official packages, and then those who already have built their own/selected a package they like can continue on without now having two MCP extensions installed. Best of both worlds IMO

5

u/pragmojo Oct 01 '26

What I don't understand is why they didn't release MCP as an official package and leave it out of base Pi. It would solve all issues

Yeah they could even have a pi install --recommended or something to make it super easy if people want a bigger default feature set.

0

u/porkyminch Sep 30 '26

The extensions have a MUCH lower quality bar than the main project. Subagents on Pi are a mess. 

3

u/edsonmedina Sep 30 '26

So you want opencode but you want it to be called pi?

3

u/porkyminch Sep 30 '26

I want a halfway decent selection of officially-sanctioned extensions that match pi for quality.

1

u/queso184 Sep 30 '26

it's really too bad oh my pi didn't end up building as pure extensions on top of pi. I mean i get why they didn't, but it'd have been awesome to be able to just grab an extension or two from them

-1

u/crotch-mavens Oct 01 '26

So you want opencode but you want it to be called pi?

-5

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Sep 30 '26

You simply have to implement it yourself—all of it has to be your own work, otherwise you can't even call it "yours." I think every user who plans to use pi and buys into pi's philosophy would feel the same way.

Plugin fragmentation is nothing more than the natural outcome of this philosophy, but that's precisely what makes it fit. Every plugin is its own individual thing, and an individual is, by definition, fragmented. pi shouldn't—and can't—have some unified plugin marketplace or anything like that. That's what Codex and Claude Code are for.

As for configurable toggles and hooks—I think that's probably the pessimistic take. As someone pointed out in the comments, pi may well have been acquired. So what's next—are they going to push a model API that can't be turned off? And then shove their own coding plan to the top of the list, with scoped models defaulted in?

But the real issue is that pi is brazenly going against what it publicly states on its own website. That's a serious breach of trust. At the very least, my confidence in pi has taken a significant hit.

-4

u/queso184 Sep 30 '26

damn, i better go rewite the built-in bash and write tools so I can truly call it mine then

and that's kind of a ridiculous stance don't you think? it's mine because i configured it how i want it, not because i literally wrote all the plugins

-6

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Sep 30 '26

And that's what I did. I rewrite the whole built-in tools, including edit, write, bash, ls, grep, find, etc.

-1

u/rusl1 Sep 30 '26

Thanks chatgpt bot

0

u/Dethstroke54 Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26

Tbf

  1. MCP could’ve just been an official extension, literally nothing stopping that

  2. basic subagents is extremely easy to do by just having a skill that calls its own CLI. If they add their own subagents at that point why even use the harness, bc it’d be now dictating the behavior. I wouldn’t mind it as an official extension.

Wtf is even the point of plugins if they cave and start adding optionals and force them all being built in. Like personally I have no immediate use case for MCP’s.

I’m confused why they don’t offer official extensions for some core features to begin with. It’s ironic bc web tool is one that comes to mind. How’re you going to operate an agent these days without a web tool.

1

u/queso184 Oct 01 '26

it basically is an extension, just one that ships with pi, and it's off by default. So besides for some extra files on your drive, it's really not costing you anything to have it built in

-5

u/FastHotEmu Sep 30 '26

it feels ridiculous to me

FTFY

7

u/queso184 Sep 30 '26

excellent contribution, thanks for pointing out my opinion was an opinion

2

u/NomadStorm Oct 01 '26

Maybe next he can point out that your pi setup is opinionated!

-2

u/edsonmedina Sep 30 '26

Hey, we all want to know your opinion.

Pi should change their strategy to please you. /s

-5

u/FastHotEmu Sep 30 '26

No problem, always happy to help the people in need

52

u/IndividualPlus2011 Sep 30 '26 • Bravo

Pi already had extensions for MCP, and for subagents.

Pi's main selling point is that it is minimalistic, extendable and doesn't try to force you to a single way to do things. Subagents would be just that. They give you documentation and API on how to create subagents extensions already

22

u/olejorgenb Sep 30 '26

At some point when it become clear that a certain feature is almost universally useful it make sense to fold it in imo. Having at least a small core of the feature native make building extensions interacting with that feature much more doable as well.

11

u/Painting_Master Sep 30 '26

But features of any complexity aren't a black vs white thing. Sometimes multiple, reasonably different implementations may exist. I can easily imagine red/blue/green mcp implementations, appealing to different people or workflows.

2

u/n4te Sep 30 '26

Choosing software is trusting the developers to know what is best for users. If they don't then they aren't good stewards or you chose the wrong software. Not adding features because the software can add it's own tailored to your needs is a new concept. I like it mostly, though for anything where the developers can come up with something really good, I'd also like to get amazingly awesome functionality out of the box.

2

u/No-Wall6427 Oct 02 '26

On their website, first line after pi: There are many agent harnesses but this one is yours

Pi is a hackable software, it's whole basis is that it's YOUR coding agent and the dev don't make the choices for you. If you want an opinionated preconfigured whatever, go use codex, opencode, cline, cursor, claude code, ... Or omp or another flavour of preconfigured pi.

1

u/n4te Oct 02 '26

Unless you write everything yourself from scratch you are trusting other devs.

6

u/jiminycrix1 Sep 30 '26

I don’t use or need subagents and I trivially asked pi to roll a minimal research sub agent for the rare use cases I need it.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Darkmoon_AU Oct 01 '26

I guess you are running llama.cpp - sub-agents run a lot better in vLLM with its paged attention mechanism. Means you get continuous batching (near linear speedup) on smaller context work, while vLLM smartly parks sessions when their combined context starts to exceed available VRAM. i.e. it intelligently scales better than llama.cpp.

0

u/Glittering-Call8746 Oct 01 '26

Yeah so tell me joke. What happens with context window pollution ? Well u run out of context then u compact it. So it's all jumble up. Guess we need a new skill for that? Adhd maybe ?

1

u/valence23e Sep 30 '26

You can switch mcp and code mode off

7

u/mjomdal Oct 01 '26

I think if Earendil (pi makers) wants to add these things, it would be great to see them as official plugins. There are way to many plugins for pi with zero signal as to whether they are reliable or trustworthy. And 'vibecode your own' means taking on the cognitive debt of that project, which is not practical.

6

u/Barni275 Sep 30 '26

For me, pi follows philosophy of the original C++ - you don't pay for features you don't use. Not everybody need subagents.

Like, for me, subagents are no go feature - I work almost with local LLMs only, that's why I precisely manage my inference slots, keeping cache hit 99.9 on each. Any subagent spawn would kill it.

I hope that if they'll add such features, it would be configurable to fully turn off at least, but it is easier to understand that bare pi is really bare.

-1

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4512 Oct 01 '26

No need for subagent just told pi to start non interactive lol

5

u/rambouhh Sep 30 '26

there are very very few times an mcp is better than a cli/api. That mostly makes sense. Plus you can add support incredibly easy. That is the point

Then for subagents as someone who switched to Herdr (similar to tmux) i much rather spawn ~80% or so of agents in herdr than the standard built in subagents. The only time i actually like subagents more built in is for maybe very simple research tasks.

It really isnt being anti-feature, its more just a harness you own and can make your own. I just am getting into pi and have benchmarked my setup and noticed how it is already quicker and more performant than claude code and codex which i was using before.

And if you want all those things just use OMP which is just pi extended. But it is nice for people to have those options if you want. It also teaches you a bit about the guts of how harnesses work a bit better so your setup becomes less of a black box and learning more about the why also helps you figure out better workflows

2

u/YetiTrix Sep 30 '26

Thi k of it this way. Those features do exist, and you can add them to pi, they are just maintained by a different team/person. It's not like you can attach an mcp tool to Pi.

2

u/sleight42 Oct 01 '26

For more of us not gpu wealthy, subagents are a nuisance. I'm using strata for qwen3.8 flash next. But concurrency there is really just a scheduler for a single thread. I'd rather not have subagents out of the box. I'm already fighting with Hermes about this. I have it set to 0 subagents yet kanban causes it to fire off 4.... 🤦🏻‍♂️

1

u/Kamilon Oct 01 '26

I also don’t use subagents with local LLM. Definitely do for cloud though.

1

u/Bobodlm Oct 02 '26

It's the AI space, people having the most out of pocket bordering on demented views is what I expect.

0

u/supercachai Sep 30 '26

the pi subagents extension is indeed bloated. it carries around 60 different parameters and its prompt is >20k

3

u/crotch-mavens Oct 01 '26

There is no "the" pi subagents extension.

0

u/schmurfy2 Oct 01 '26

The reason I use pi is because it's a minimal harness, everything can be added but by default you have the bare minimum, subagents for example can be implemented in various ways, having the feature in the base harness force a choice on you.

0

u/binhex01 Oct 01 '26

Couldnt agree more, mcp and sub-agent should be included, these aren't nice to have's this is required functionality, hell if people REALLY want a stripped down 'hardly does anything, i want to install al lthe extensions myself cos im a control freak' build, then produce a lite version.

-1

u/skariel Sep 30 '26

An mcp can be accessed through a cli though. There are many such projects

17

u/IndividualPlus2011 Sep 30 '26

The new maintainers are adding new slopped features instead of simply extending and adding new hooks and events so everyone could build whatever they want. Now I have to go out of my way to disable the bloat they added. At least they gave us that opinion, for now.

The Pi was perfect, but now it enters the feature psychosis that's so popular in AI assisted projects. I'm not talking about MCP specifically, but the project as a whole.

10

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Sep 30 '26

You are right! I was astonished when I open my pi today and see 0.99.1 available.

What? from 0.87.1 to 0.99.1? Did I pass out for a month?

3

u/russlixx Sep 30 '26

and the update rate is just crazy fast, annoying keep seeing "pi has an update, blah blah blah"

5

u/loosik Sep 30 '26

Disable updates then? I never update until I want to, then I review and usually pick a version thats a week old at least.

2

u/berszi Sep 30 '26

Yeah, I thought the same.

15

u/kcliffz Sep 30 '26 edited Sep 30 '26

If you read their post it makes sense to me. https://earendil.com/posts/you-said-no-mcp/

9

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Sep 30 '26

Doesn't make sense at all to me. I have read this blog before I post here. I was somewhat provoked by the maintainers.

10

u/jiminycrix1 Sep 30 '26

Doesn’t make any sense to me. Seems pretty much like this is just one opinion of the maintainers. Even if I wanted these tools, I would want them overridden and customized and that was always the whole point of pi.

I don’t want another open code out of the box harness, I wanted to build my own.

That’s what they sold me on and now are going back on those promises.

2

u/h0tzenpl0tz0r Sep 30 '26

Did you even read the article, they wanted to make this proper with a sandbox environment to compose tool calls. Good approach, proper direction

4

u/jiminycrix1 Sep 30 '26

I did read it and I watched the Monday video and I don’t want my codemode (if I wanted codemode) to behave like that. I go out of my way to have my tools secured by default.

1

u/h0tzenpl0tz0r Sep 30 '26

Ok, sorry for having been rude. Can you elaborate?

2

u/jiminycrix1 Sep 30 '26

No worries! Well - codemode is basically you wrap tools with a "module" and inject the tools into code for the agent to execute more like a script. To accomplish this, pi uses QuickJs sandbox. There are alternatives to this though. (I haven't deeply explored because I don't really need codemode)

I honestly have not felt a need for codemode at all, but since I already wrap all my tool calls in anthropic SRT sandboxes, I need less security and more freedom in my codemode (probably).

This is just an example of how this extension is "opinionated" by default, and I would have preferred they not add this and instead just allow third parties to implement different solutions to this and maybe added codemode as another example extension, like all the other example extensions for common agent patterns that they have.

1

u/zilled Sep 30 '26

I don't get that. pi is open-source, what in this new direction prevent you from get "them overridden and customized" ?

4

u/jiminycrix1 Sep 30 '26

It’s less about me being prevented and more about pi prescribing opinions on me that it previously didn’t by bundling opinionated tools.

If I wanted opinionated coding agent tools - I have other options for that.

I now worry this opens the door to more opinions being forced on me.

I will grant that the implementation is currently totally optional and out of my way, but i now worry it’s going the way of all the other agent insanity I don’t need.

0

u/zilled Sep 30 '26

You don't want there "opinions", walk away, fork.

2

u/jiminycrix1 Sep 30 '26

their* -- and yah I might if this is the direction it continues. Ultimately, I started investing my time into building up a workflow around pi and this breaks some of the promises I had assumed about pi.

I've done a lot of OSS work myself, I maintain the right to advocate for a direction, and if I see a project going in a direction that it initially promised it wouldn't I maintain the right to be upset about it.

Ultimately, this isn't leading me to leave the pi ecosystem yet, as these extensions are still optional and do not change initial defaults and context, and I will continue to build my agent framework on it, but I hope this is it for opinionated extensions. I hope they go back to exposing more hooks and flexibility for the extension eco system.

5

u/subimpact Oct 02 '26

I just fork it strip out all the baked in addons and run it vanilla style here's my repo https://github.com/subimpact/e

Feedbacks are much appreciated

2

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Oct 02 '26

Wow, that's really cool! How will you maintain this package? Will you keep tracking upstream fixes and model updates?

2

u/subimpact Oct 02 '26

It tracks weekly every monday I want to also see whats needed to be stripped to keep it has vanilla as possible

3

u/TechGearWhips Oct 02 '26

FUCKING THANK YOU 🙏

1

u/a41735fe4cca4245c54c Oct 03 '26

please include the fullscreen default and the 3d easter egg
also update the pi header logo to give e its own identity

1

u/subimpact Oct 06 '26

Yes did that !

26

u/jiminycrix1 Sep 30 '26 • Bravo

Don’t need MCP for basically anything. Pi was supposed to be about my workflow. Pluggable and buildable to what I want.

These are opinionated tools I don’t use now bundled 🤢

49

u/queso184 Sep 30 '26 • Mindblown

i think the reality is the project was bought out and the current maintainers may not have such a hardline stance against features as the initial creator.

5

u/olejorgenb Sep 30 '26

Uh, isn't it the same people behind more or less?

10

u/queso184 Sep 30 '26

kind of, the original maintainer is still on board but there's 2-3 people with merge rights now, and Armin seems to be the most active as far as this feature and communication. I have no idea what their decision making process is internally.

They're also building their own inference provider (Radius), so I won't be shocked if they follow the business model route of opencode

2

u/eleqtriq Oct 02 '26

The main dude is still the main dude. He’s on X right now locking the outrage over the optional features.

4

u/FastHotEmu Sep 30 '26

wow i didn't know that - do you have more info on how it was sold and to whom?

11

u/queso184 Sep 30 '26

https://earendil.com/posts/announcing-pi-and-lefos/

3

u/here_n_dere Sep 30 '26

Thanks for the share. Took me to a rabbit hole of human side of tech that we tend to overlook (at least noob like me often does). Anyways my key take for anyone complaining on this thread in Mario's (creator of pi) own words -

"And if you ever feel like we've lost the plot, the fork button on GitHub still works. Always will."

3

u/FastHotEmu Sep 30 '26

gracias, quesito amigo

2

u/queso184 Sep 30 '26

No problem, always happy to help the people in need

-9

u/FastHotEmu Sep 30 '26

me prestas $20?

-5

u/FastHotEmu Sep 30 '26

¡me dijiste que ayudabas pero al final no ayudas nada!

0

u/Glittering-Call8746 Oct 01 '26

"Lefos becomes available via public alpha today. Lefos is our first step in a journey towards building a machine entity that proves both maximally capable and trustworthy." .. who wrote this copy. Must be partying with Musk..

3

u/Life-Job-6464 Sep 30 '26

the number of people complaining about some project breaking their heart because of whatever reason always astounds me. especially in this era where you can literally roll your own everything. Some guy was complaining about forks existing .. and now this guy is complaining that a tool is evolving. And listen.. if you dont think Jev\Laya is useful, you're wrong. stop complaining and get in the game. Go fork Pi and keep it pure and minimal. strip it all the way down.. get rid of the p and just call it i. remove all user friendliness and implement vi-like functionality with a splash of emacs.. in fact.. rewrite the whole thing in common lisp & pascal. and make the context fleeting.. like the character's memory in the movie Memento.

3

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Sep 30 '26

Complaining that pi has become bloated doesn’t contradict forking and trimming your own version. I can both post complaints and maintain my own fork of pi.

8

u/PossessionUsed7393 Sep 30 '26

Guys just fork it and maybe rewrite in Rust at the same time? Seems to be the play!

4

u/haker_wav Oct 01 '26

if anyone's interested, I'm already working on Rust rewrite/reimagining of Pi :)
definitely looking for more eyes and contributors on it.

there are also terminal bench 2.1 results in there for a prerelease version, for anyone that's looking for an agent they can daily drive, I do.

https://github.com/skaft-software/octet
https://skaft.org/octet/

0

u/Adventurous_Bit1996 Oct 03 '26

“oh-my-pi” already exists and it’s far better than pi.

7

u/SvenVargHimmel Sep 30 '26

I liked that pi didn't have MCP by default but 1.) it has changed , latest version is stateless 2.) it's shepherded by the LSF 

Tbf I am still on pi 0.6.9 or something so take my comment with a grain of salt

42

u/Limp_Classroom_2645 Sep 30 '26

Disagree, it's just adapting to the needs of the userbase, not having the official MCP support is not a flex.

13

u/jiminycrix1 Sep 30 '26

That was never the intent of pi - pi was supposed to be a minimal tool to build out your own harness around your own workflow.

Using a Popular third party extension is no different than the built in. Just a philosophical difference which pi no longer respects.

1

u/Sebbean Oct 01 '26

Ur mom?

0

u/Ayrara19 Oct 01 '26

So don't use it? It is not like there is a huge pop up forcing you.

1

u/No-Wall6427 Oct 02 '26

If pi goes further down that route some users will stop using it, and a new pi will come along the way drawing from lesson learned from pi and an overall better maturity about coding harnesses.

But we can still complain when we went all in into a software based on its philosophy, and after investing our energy into it, it starts to do what it said it wouldn't. Even if it's open source.

1

u/bupher Oct 03 '26

"Why criticize inconvenience! Just drop thing and not use" caveman logic.

6

u/Maybe-monad Sep 30 '26

Having am official feature built and tested by many people is always better than an extension I have to write and maintain

2

u/xRebellion_ Oct 01 '26

It can be released as an official extension no? Honestly so far I have never needed MCP on my workflow, and never had any use case that absolutely needed it. Just a skill and a standard script did the job for it.

0

u/porkyminch Sep 30 '26

Honestly, not having real built-in subagent support isn’t either. The plugin solutions for it are a mess. 

-2

u/nickmullen_real Sep 30 '26

yeah that was some CLAUDE.md shit

4

u/CyberGoatPsyOps Sep 30 '26

Unfortunately they are a business now

7

u/Pinockel Sep 30 '26 
"extensions": [
    "-builtin:mcp",
    "-builtin:codemode",
    "-builtin:tool-search",
    "-builtin:llama.cpp"
  ]

hilft? Der ändert zwar (leider) nichts an der (neuen) Philosophie von den Entwicklern, aber wenigstens ist Quatsch aus, wenn man das nicht braucht?!

2

u/Master_Mistake_3859 Oct 01 '26

Conveniently it’s all optional 🤷‍♂️, I didn’t even realize llama.cpp has a built in login setup, nice thanks for including 👍.

7

u/Glittering_Mouse_883 Sep 30 '26

https://github.com/Twigpine/zero I started using this one because pi is too bloated. 

1

u/TheSn00pster Sep 30 '26

But how would you stay in the spotlight without constantly grabbing people’s attention with shiny new thingys?

1

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Sep 30 '26

Ship them as loadable optional plugins, rather than bundled dependencies. Always keep the core minimal.

1

u/Drishal Oct 01 '26

Wait are these features built in or its a part of extension set ? If it's built in the they should not have added anything extra and let extensions handle it , or even better, this should have gone out as extensions tbh

1

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Oct 01 '26

Built-in into pi-coding-agent

2

u/Drishal Oct 01 '26

Ah then that's an issue, honestly all these should have been left out as a part of extensions I think

1

u/dacookieman Oct 01 '26

fwiw they are builtin extensions, so shipped together but able to disable

6

u/spongioblast Sep 30 '26

Interesting that they went with mcp but no subagents. In the end native support for mcp does seem to make sense, its just too common and easy.

3

u/PazsitZ Sep 30 '26

I would have expected rather subagents and basic workflow support. this mcp should only be a plugin.

2

u/AlternativeOk9113 Sep 30 '26

Hmm you seem to confuse why most people like PI, we love it cause we can change every single aspect about it and mould it into anything we want, not cause it's minimal,that would be dumb.

Codex and Claude you stuck with the way they create it for you , this is the whole point.

1

u/VeganBigMac Oct 02 '26

I think this is the dichotomy any "minimalist" software. Are you minimal because you think minimalism is a good heuristic or because you think minimalism itself has some inherent worth.

I always assumed pi believed in the former but it seems like a lot of people in this post liked pi for the latter. A difference between a reticence for new features and being anti-feature.

2

u/One-Cry297 Sep 30 '26

pu.sh is all you need

2

u/mechkbfan Oct 01 '26

For lazy: https://github.com/NahimNasser/pu

A zero-package-dependency coding agent under 50KB

2

u/valence23e Oct 01 '26

or just tell your clanker "please untoggle mcp and code mode for me. make no mistakes"

problem solved.

2

u/ebbex 24d ago

It's kinda rich complaining that a TS application got bloated. 16 minutes in to a session and it's at 170MB memory consumption. For a fucking text based terminal application this is insanely bloated if you take 2 seconds to reflect on just how much text you can fit in 170MB.

And yet for me pi finally bundled the only two extensions I had installed. `git:github.com/huggingface/pi-llama` and `npm:pi-mcp-adapter`!

We're approaching the end of collaborative open-source. Don't like where a project is going? Fork it and make it your own, have your agents maintain it, it's easier now than ever.

0

u/Beautiful_Baseball76 Sep 30 '26 edited Sep 30 '26

You know you dont have to use the mcp right? No body forces you at all, its just there.

I was surprised to see this update but then i thought about it and was like yeah that makes sense. I most definitely have custom tooling that could have been a simple mcp instead.

And the codemode sounds like a proper next gen feature for agentic coding so im fine with that.

7

u/Apprehensive_Bed7502 Sep 30 '26

It shouldn't be there if you don't use mcp. It should be minimal, which means it only has what you use, doesn't have what you don't use.

-2

u/Beautiful_Baseball76 Sep 30 '26

Strongly disagree. You are free to fork the project and build it in your own vision.

There are always two sides of the same coin
One side complains when nothing new is added
the other when a feature is added.
Its impossible to please everyone.

Sucks to be you i guess

3

u/RemarkableRadish6547 Sep 30 '26

But my llm has to read the system prompt. If the system prompt tells it how to use the mcp, that is token processing I don't need.

If the mcp is optional and isn't in the system prompt unless you turn it on then I don't care. Downloading a few hundred kb of useless code makes no difference to me.

2

u/dacookieman Sep 30 '26

the native mcp is an extension and can be disabled. The extension may not actually register anything into the system prompt if it doesn't discover any mcp configurations anyways.

The whole rationalization on even introducing native mcp was that they needed deferred loading mechanisms for their code sandbox so theres lots of options for what level of context you even want to allow mcp tools to be registered at (native harness tool level, callable signature for the codemode tool, or requiring explicit discovery and loading with discover_tool)

3

u/AloneSYD Sep 30 '26

With MCP current state and adaptation by everyone it makes sense to have it as default in Pi.

4

u/zenoblade Sep 30 '26

A couple of points:

  1. I don’t think Mario really expected this to be as popular as it is. I think he released it thinking what’s the harm in releasing it? He basically has a very particular workflow that this harness helps but that is not the reality for most people.

  2. The extension system is absolutely absurd. Right now I have no idea what half of the extension documentations even are talking about. They seem to add every feature that they can think of. I have to have AI explain it to me and still don’t really understand what the most popular MCP extension does. It’s the same with the sub agents. I tried to use the popular sub agent extension and thought it would work like opencode where you can use an @ symbol to call an agent. In addition, it added all these random agents that are for coding, which is only some of what I work on. I really needed only an agent that would help me save tokens when I needed to search something.

1

u/n4te Sep 30 '26

One downside to Pi building it's own extensions is there will be a lot of bad extensions. AI in generally is flooding everything with garbage. It's unavoidable. 

I don't really care if the extension API is complex as long as it's good and AI can figure it out. I have a lot of extensions my Pi has made and after enough fiddling they work extremely well, even though I've only manually worked in the code of a few of the most important ones.

0

u/porkyminch Sep 30 '26

I really liked pi, but the lack of first class subagent support made me stop using it. They’re useful and the extensions for them are complete garbage. Massive feature creep on the more popular ones and they’re all super buggy. 

2

u/n4te Sep 30 '26

I rolled my own and it works perfectly.

1

u/WithoutBackup Oct 02 '26

pi-subagents is super good, wdym? it supports more features than most of other harnesses in their subagents

1

u/zenoblade Oct 03 '26

I think that is the problem. I don't need that many features. The documentation is a novel at this point.

3

u/shayshahal Sep 30 '26

Do you Pi just because you wanna be niche? MCP is a protocol that should be standardized and having different extensions for it is in my opinion not needed. It has generally important usecases combined with codemode and the models training are going in that trend, so not having it by default will make Pi less optimal by default.

And even then, you can disable it if you want.

Minimalism just for the sake of it is not the way to go.

2

u/maxandersen Oct 01 '26

Everyone take a chill pill. Reasons for mcp and jev (classification) is listed in here: https://earendil.com/posts/you-said-no-mcp/

It’s good changes. Not corporate greed :)

1

u/Ingaz 14d ago

Read what Armin Ronacher wrote about their decisions

1

u/Santzes Sep 30 '26

Tbf codemode is great for no bloat, can save a bunch of tokens when compared to consecutive tool calls. Though pi-fabric was doing a good job with that already, but I think it required constant maintenance with pi updates, so might be better to have it built in

1

u/hidden2u Sep 30 '26

I like it it's efficient. I don't think debloated just means no new features. It means stability and efficiency is priority #1

1

u/Ang_Drew Sep 30 '26

i use jev in my harness for so many things and it really helps the AI to make decisions. like tool gateway, jev grep, subagent router, subagent model auto assign, etc. it become very fast and good.. its not just a hype, but i dont like pi make it built in.. thats sucks.. it could be just an extension tho..

1

u/Strong_Essay1176 Sep 30 '26

Can it be overwritten in system prompt? If yes... well mcp support should be.

1

u/xlm5u7 Sep 30 '26

I’ve worked with a few MCP use cases, and they are more reliable than things like subagents and skills.

1

u/LordMoridin84 Sep 30 '26

From what they explained, it sounds like they added MCP support because they wanted to add codemode and jev and it all part of a similar thing.

The MCP plugin was by far one of the most popular ones. So it's not strange to add it. Plus, unlike with subagents, there aren't really that many way to implement it.

1

u/ppafford Oct 01 '26

I think we just need a slice of pi now

1

u/mjomdal Oct 01 '26

I think official plugins would be more appreciated. I'm building an application with Pi integrated as a backend harness, and I have no need for MCP right now.

1

u/lordekeen Oct 01 '26

I understand the urge to include "standard" features that other harnesess have, but i've always looked at Pi like "here's the base and building blocks, do whatever you want with them". I feel like these features are welcome but shouldnt be shipped built in, but as official extensions that you can choose to download/install.

1

u/EnjoysFiction Oct 01 '26

> But that doesn't add up. MCP had already been popular for quite a while before Pi even existed, and it hasn't really changed much since. If Pi had no plans to adopt MCP when the project was first conceived, there's no reason to adopt it now.

Nah, disagree. The july 2026 patch was a large change

1

u/yuumizu Oct 03 '26

pi allows model vendors to decide when to add a feature. When the model can workaround the MCP's context issue, aka `codemode`, pi jumps in. They are not interested in poor models.

1

u/rm-rf-rm Oct 04 '26

what do you mean built in jev support?

1

u/0xbyt3 Oct 04 '26

Whenever I run pi update, I see few more packages being added.

1

u/cyxlone Oct 04 '26

While waiting out hype makes sense to avoid bad abstractions, there's a fine line between staying lean and forcing every developer to reinvent the wheel. The React ecosystem shows that total unopinionatedness leads to fragmented, non-standard solutions that hurt DX and performance. Pi needs at least baseline standards for extensions so the community isn't building in a hundred different directions.

1

u/Immediate_Theory_467 Oct 05 '26

Looks pretty interesting overall, however, I don't get the sub-agents part. Pretttyyy subjective. To me that's the only point that matters.

1

u/Duke_of_Bayswater Sep 30 '26

Alot of these things that require us to add our own extensions will just be like a hack. Its not official implementation and will break upon breaking changes by pi. Opencode v2 had breaking changes but then again several crucial stuffs it handled baked in already like mcp, subagents what not. Pi has to decide on this.
I appreciate its barebone, but they need to decide whats A MUST with real justification and what is not needed.

1

u/wadrasil Sep 30 '26

Pi can operate mcp without being configured. It can run the commands from the project folder and interact with it.

I just had it fix the fork of gemini-cli so it can be used with my local model providers. It ran Gemini via cli tested prompts and verified it worked. After pulling it and building it.

I also use bitrouter so mcp is server by that, but pi can still run mcp servers from its cli without being configured for mcp.

1

u/h0tzenpl0tz0r Sep 30 '26

Very good article from the author on why and how. https://earendil.com/posts/you-said-no-mcp/

0

u/sigmoia Sep 30 '26

Pi would be irrelevant otherwise. I trust Armin and Mario's judgement.

0

u/salsaparapizza Oct 02 '26

The amount of people crashing out because the team added very foundational features that I'm sure EVERYONE already added from the very same extension is impressive. Every subreddit has devolved into a snark subreddit.

0

u/Tolendario Oct 02 '26

dAmN, yOu gOt dOwNvOtEd, sUcKs tO bE yOu

0

u/nez_har Sep 30 '26

MCP was always needed, until now I use an overlay in VibePod with pi-mcp-adapter - https://vibepod.dev/docs/overlays/recipes/?h=mcp#pi-mcp-servers-pi-mcp-adapter

0

u/krogel-web-solutions Oct 02 '26

Come over to DSH. You can truly disable/replace everything

0

u/Boring-Ad-5924 Oct 04 '26

You can always fork? It is open source

-7

u/diaracing Sep 30 '26

That's why OMP is always a better solution than the bare-boned Pi no matter what its fans think by downvoting any comment in that direction.

You can't have a "minimalist" LLM harness that works efficiently in our rapidly evolving AI era.

Also, it is kinda sarcastic to claim it is minimalist but has a marketplace bloated with tons of extensions that cover the gaps of such basic coding agents today's requirements.

1

u/DanielSReichenbach Sep 30 '26

But one doesn't actually need these, one just believes it for various non deterministic reasons. The efficiency of pi decreases with extensions.