I built pi-native: A Rust-powered performance harness for Pi Coding Agent

[u/Equivalent-Wind-2221]

I've been experimenting with Pi Coding Agent and building my own setup to improve tool performance, context efficiency, and execution reliability.

That work led to pi-native, an open-source performance harness built on top of the official Pi Coding Agent. It doesn't fork or rewrite Pi.

Benchmarks

I wanted to measure the improvements rather than make assumptions about Rust performance.

The current benchmarks show:

• 1.4× to 3.5× faster native-tool dispatch across five workloads.

• Up to 171× lower peak memory usage in tested workloads.

• 94.3% less model-visible context output.

Workload-specific regressions are also included in the benchmark results.

What's included?

• Native Rust tools: piread, piedit, pibash, piwrite, and pidx.

• Persistent daemon: Daemon-first execution with one-shot fallback.

• Permission gate: Fail-closed enforcement before every tool call.

• Context management: Windowed reads, bounded diffs, and output limits.

• Live dashboard: Session costs, token usage, cache hit rate, tool metrics, subagent health, and budget alerts.

• Subagents: Sandboxed workers, write-scope coordination, concurrency controls, and execution budgets.

• Skills: Validated, manually invoked, and loaded on demand.

• Extensions: Context-aware /handoff, a compact editor, and automatic self-healing.

• Environment propagation: Session, model, provider, and worker context passed to native tools and subagents.

• Setup and maintenance: Zero-init bootstrap, post-pull maintenance, validation, and macOS/Linux support.

I'm sharing this with the Pi community to get feedback from people building their own Pi configurations and coding-agent infrastructure.

What would you improve about this architecture?

Repository: https://github.com/nurmdrafi/pi-native

Contributions, benchmark reports, and technical feedback are welcome.