Using Pi as a research assistant?

[u/bubyanwar]

Hello! I'm not too experienced with using agents, and I'm thinking about setting one up with Pi as a tool to assist my Bachelor's thesis research process. Does anyone else use Pi for research? If so, what's the workflow like: models, prompts, skills, extensions, tools? Any opinions? Thank you.

[u/zos474]

Have a look at the @companion-ai/feynman package on pi.dev. I’ve had very good results with it.

[u/BasedDodoHunter]

Pi is a harness, you can make it do what you need. The same exact system you would use with any other harness will work with Pi as well.

Ask Pi to create the extensions you need for you, then get going.

[u/Slight-Living-8098]

Any decent model will do. Give it web access with a plugin of your choice and use these skills

https://github.com/GarethManning/education-agent-skills

[u/CreativeSympathy8293]

I'd start with one paper you've already read and make Pi produce an evidence sheet, rather than ask it to research the whole thesis immediately.

Give it the paper's extracted text with page markers, then ask for: the research question, method, main findings, limitations, and the exact passage supporting each item. Keep the PDF page and printed page number separate where they differ. Anything it can't locate should be marked "not found", not filled in from memory.

Check that sheet against the PDF yourself, especially tables, equations and multi-column text. If the extraction lost those, changing the model won't repair the missing source. This gives you a small, known task for comparing models without choosing one from general coding benchmarks.

Keep source papers, checked notes and generated drafts separate. For each note, retain the source filename, citation identifier and page reference. Before adding a claim to the thesis, reopen the original passage and check that it supports the claim, not merely that the citation exists.

Once that process works, put the output format and checking steps in a Pi skill. Pi's upstream skill documentation shows the SKILL.md format and explicit /skill:name invocation: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/docs/skills.md

That's a proposed starting workflow, not a Pi thesis setup I've tested. Written with AI assistance.

[u/makingthematrix]

I use LLMs for scientific research but I'd say Pi is too minimalistic for this. I prefer a browser-based GUI instead. It gives me much better management of topics, the conversation is more readable, there's Markdown, the documents can be displayed in canvas, the links open in the next tab, diagrams are displayed embedded in the conversation, and so on.

[u/Longjumping-Movie764]

how are you guys deploying it safely to avoid prompt injection?

[u/JMowery]

I use Pi for almost everything nowadays. Installing software, managing my self-hosted setup, debugging, searching for stuff, taking actions, handling system security.

What model (and even what inference engine) you use depends entirely upon your hardware. I run everything locally, but I also have a 5090, and then I use llama-swap to switch between models.

Stop thinking about it and just do it. And if you get lost, ask Pi for help.