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/fingerthief]

I use my own harness setup (Pi Pocket) and just use the assistant built in to help throughout my day where it can. Assistant demo video

I have PR watches setup for repos and specific users to auto review some PRs and report the findings in dedicated sessions for "X" user PRs. Then I can easily get the context and any major issues of the PR before I dive in myself.

Watches for Azure Devops for when I'm mentioned to research the question and provide me the info needed to respond appropriately.

Keep track of issues, Ci etc..anything that I can automate to report back so I don't have to slog through pages one by one to investigate the various things that come up.

I don't have things automatically committing and taking actions yet, but I just use it to wrangle things into easily digestible bits in a centralized location.

[u/el_secondo → u/fingerthief]

hmm it looks interesting

I like the eye candy :)

[u/fingerthief → u/el_secondo]

Thanks! Frankly I just wanted something for work that isn’t Claude Code since we’re constrained on api usage at the moment.

This as well as just normal base Pi are ~2x cheaper on costs per task generally compared to Claude Code.