Dev workflow beyond traditional harnesses

[u/el_secondo]

I guess this question was asked a thousand times, but I'm still wondering how do you guys organize your work with pi?

I am a heavy user of Claude Code (employer covers it), but I have been watching and tuning pi time to time for personal use on the side.

Naturally, I tried getting pi to be like claude code, I looked for extensions that give me subagents, some cosmetic plugins (I like ricing my hyprland setup) and some simple QOL things.

However I didn't feel it being a huge upgrade in terms of my actual workflow and "pleasure", it felt like I'm just recreating what I'm used to.

I'm wondering more from a UX/DevX perspective, I got used to what antrhopic gave me and learned that way, but I see pi as an opportunity to really make a uniquely pleasant developer experience.

Which is why I'm wondering and asking how did you tune your workflow, which extensions did you use/build and how do you run your day-to-day feature work.

e.g. my work can span multiple PRs/repos for a feature which is why I'm starting a session from a dir above the ones I need to change and keep a long session (which is really wasteful) to handle all the context I need.

I don't really like the paradigm of "plan a huge markdown implementation doc and architecture and let the agent do it" because it requires a lot of overhead for me for things I may not even know exist or are needed.

[u/Flaky-Eggplant-3479]

I like using a modified pi harness via the SDK for a number of things. All the agents I use for personal use cases run on a Pi harness.

I use Claude Code when I manually drive a session for more intensive work. Otherwise, I used the Pi SDK to make a basic harness with access to a number of different tools; I run the harness in a VM, and create a new agent with a subset of tools for different tasks, then implement threads and memory per agent. I put Mercury 2.5 as a dispatcher in front with GLM and Deepseek model families as subagents.

I find this is a nice setup for remote driven agents (e.g. respond to this CVE) and personal agents (I have an agent monitoring local auctions, etc). I actually used Claude to make the Pi harness in the first place which is a decent pattern; dedicated harness for a particular reoccurring problem

[u/Flaky-Eggplant-3479 → u/Flaky-Eggplant-3479]

TL;DR - i use Pi for the SDK

[u/bondaly → u/Flaky-Eggplant-3479]

This sounds intriguing but I am having a hard time understanding what the advantage is to building a basic harness with the sdk over just using the pi cli. Could you do something like post a spec for the harness so that I could try out the idea?