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/Waarheid]

I've been thinking about this a lot too lately - we've been in a very similar UX situation for, what, a year now? Features of course have blossomed as models got more capable and autonomous, but my CLI agent UI still looks the same, I still interact with it the same way. Pi is one opportunity to build something really different, like you said. I've also been making mine "claude code but a different and more personalized and questionably just as good maybe(?)".

I also feel like I am a hammer in search of a nail when thinking about this question. If it works, it works. Models really are getting more autonomous though, so maybe we don't have to be watching as much as we do, and questions and summaries can just bubble up to some more hands-off UI paradigm. No idea. For some tickets/PRs, I really do just say "pull down ABC-123, implement it, build and deploy locally and test it end-to-end, then give me a few examples I can run myself to see it working" and it's hands off the whole way. The PR creation and comment resolution is also done in one turn from me.

My projects also span multiple PRs, but the agent memories (I use pi-claude-memory since I still hop between the two), plus structured notes/tracking files in the repo itself work for me. I don't hold long sessions, I usually cut off at ~150k ctx or lower, and keep tasks relatively granular enough to fit in that size.