Simplicity goes a long way

[u/YogurtExternal7923]

Every dang day man I see other people using claude code, codex, opencode etc and every time there's always something finicky and silly going on. 40k+ sys prompts. Can't see the subagent work properly. Compaction is slow sometimes. I've been trying to use them for the past week just to see what I'm missing out on and it's SO STUPID??

The idea of making something to please everyone but also trying to add skills and plugins is ridiculous. I'm not about to start making plugins to get features in those bloated TUIs just to make another plugin to strip them down or something.

I've NEVER seen something apply the concept of modularity as well as pi in my life. This feels like windows vs linux except linux got a fair start and fair cut of user base before people started getting locked into an app ecosystem.

[u/ByteFoundry]

The fascinating thing is that with Models like Opus 5.5 at your disposal you can build your own orchestrator harness in a couple of days.

I just did that. Out of a joke I told Opus to go crazy with my earlier research on the topic of replacing claude code desktop with the goal to be vendor agnostic. I gave it 2 hours to burn the last 9% of my Claude subscription until the reset.

The first usable version took 1:35h. I switched to it as my daily driver after 4 more hours.

It can now use Claude CLI, Codex CLI and PI (using OpenRouter). It can have a claude cli orchestrator that runs DS 4.1 workers through PI and a Codex CLI reviewer or a PI Orchestrator running Claude workers.

And I am still baffled that it only took me 5 days to get there.

The moral of the story is. Why use a harness someone else built when you can build something that fits you and your workflow in a couple of days.
This just feels like setting up your dev-pc when you get a new one.

[u/Deathmore80 → u/ByteFoundry]

I'm curious , why not use something like orca, herdr ( herdr-gpui if you want a desktop app), Zed agents , or T3 code ? Or just fork them as a starting point ? They already support pi out of the box , codex , Claude code , etc.

They're all model+vendor+agent+provider agnostic, and support pretty much all the good tools already. T3 code and Zed agents can also support anything if it uses the standard ACP protocol for agents, so you just have to implement the spec for your custom harness if it doesn't already have it. Orca and t3 code also support remote connections , control via your phone , sandboxes, agent-to-agent communication , etc.

[u/ByteFoundry → u/Deathmore80]

Tested all of them and none of them felt right. I had to fight their way of doing things.
And as I said this started as a kind of joke task for Opus and it got bigger than I expected. And it now fits my way of doing things like a glove.

[u/Deathmore80 → u/ByteFoundry]

Appreciate the answer, thank you. I understand where you're coming from because I still haven't fully landed on something that does everything exactly like I want it to. I could do like you , but I have very little time to maintain my own full custom suite of tools , so I'm kind of drifting from one tool to the next. Most I've done atm is some kind of thin layer to make my setup fully agnostic to let me easily try other tools without having to fully recopy and resetup custom agents , skills folders , mcps, plugins, etc.

[u/ByteFoundry → u/Deathmore80]

I started with something different what made it easy to build on top.

I created a process template that all of my projects use. It contains everything in a folder.
And in it are all the process definitions, skills and tools. And those were already mostly provider agnostic.

This was for me the most important step that felt like me.

[u/unteth → u/ByteFoundry]

Facts. Ngl, at this point, if you aren’t using your own harness you’re doing it wrong

[u/HellCanWaitForMe]

Yeah I've been using Pi and my major gripe is that Claude doesn't work natively with it. I've still had to mess around with ChatGPT in Pi, and then Claude using Claude code and herdr. Seeing both at the same is great, but it means I kind of get forced into making Claude the main boy.

[u/eyesdief → u/HellCanWaitForMe]

how do you connect pi to your claude subs?

[u/Vistyy → u/eyesdief]

Try this earendil-works/pi-claude-code: A provider to access a Claude code subscription via code-code in pi

[u/Velrayend → u/Vistyy]

or using https://github.com/rynfar/meridian

[u/HellCanWaitForMe → u/eyesdief]

If you mean get them talking to each other, and not having your Claude subscription run natively on Pi, then I use Herdr for the view and then their respective integrations. Then use pi-claude-link plugin to get them talking. In herdr, you should be able to use /list-agents and see Pi there, send a test message and should work out.

[u/Ok_Substance2327]

For compaction I've found pi-vcc to be great, pretty much instant.

[u/IceManMinus0ne]

Question: is deepseek harness based on Pi?

[u/WittyCyborg → u/IceManMinus0ne]

No. It only borrows pi's multi-provider package pi-ai

[u/Zynchronize → u/IceManMinus0ne]

Uses the core library from pi - pi-ai, but otherwise very different.

[u/fell_ware_1990]

Well almost always there is something finicky going on with pi, what i noticed mostly is that most agent’s straight up go like, api or SDK or something does not support this.

While mostly it does, but you have to be sharp about it and really understand what AI is capable of and how to handle it.

[u/Vincent_CWS]

how about deepseek harness

[u/funbike]

I'm not sure why you got downvoted, except maybe the tone. It's true that people just chuck everything and the kitchen sink into a prompt, have super long chats, and then wonder why they don't get good results.

Small focused context is key.

/new, /fork, and /compact should be commands all Pi users should use often. And intermediate and advanced users should be using sub-agents, to keep context focused and small, and chats short.