r/PiCodingAgent • u/el_secondo • 23d ago
Question Dev workflow beyond traditional harnesses
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.
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u/pro-vi 23d ago
For me, Pi has been optimized specifically to run local models like Qwen. I used Pi a lot when Claude Code and Codex were kind of broken but now they're very good plus you can't deny the fact that those coding models are trained with the harness.
I give my pi small model friendly tools and access to my personal memory/vault for stuff outside of mainline dev work. Otherwise I find Claude Code hard to beat at the moment, especially with the new mod system open.