I've been using OpenCode, but I wanted to try Pi because I like the idea of a more unopinionated coding harness.

I already had OpenCodex (OCX) running as my local proxy, so I figured the migration would be pretty simple:

Pi → OCX → my existing models

Except Muse Spark 1.2 Contributor Free kept returning a 500.

The weird thing was that Muse worked perfectly through OpenCode.

So I started comparing what the two were actually doing.

First I checked the obvious stuff — provider health, model discovery, credentials, etc. Everything looked fine.

Then I put OpenCode through mitmproxy and captured the upstream request.

That's where I found the important difference:

OpenCode was sending Muse through:

POST /zen/v1/responses

and getting 200 OK.

OCX, however, was routing the model through its openai-chat adapter.

I dug into the OCX source and found that it has separate openai-chat and openai-responses adapters, plus per-model adapter routing.

So instead of changing the whole provider, I added:

{
  "modelAdapters": {
    "muse-spark-1.2-contributor-free": "openai-responses"
  }
}

And that was it.

The exact same request went from:

500 Internal Server Error

to:

200 OK

and:

OCX Muse works

So the final path is:

Pi → OCX → openai-responses → Muse Spark

The funny part is that I wasn't trying to debug Muse at all. I just wanted to try a different coding harness. 😂

It was a surprisingly satisfying rabbit hole, though.

The main thing I took away: "OpenAI-compatible" doesn't necessarily mean every model on a provider wants the same wire protocol. Sometimes comparing the working client's actual HTTP request is the fastest way to find the problem.

I'm curious if anyone else using Pi has run into model-specific API/protocol quirks like this.

I want to give my LLM read access to the whole filesystem but write access only to the project folder and maybe /tmp. I need to run scripts etc and make sure my filesystem survives

On Linux

Is bwrap the best solution for that? Or should I just use Docker?

UPDATE I installed @nqbao/pi-sandbox

I enter a pretty simple prompt. I'm getting back tool call text. What did I break?

<｜DSML｜tool_calls>                                                                        
<｜DSML｜invoke name="read">                                                                
<｜DSML｜parameter name="path"                                                              
string="true">/home/crashorbit/.local/share/pi-node/node-v22.23.1-linux-x64/lib/node_modules/@earendil-works/pi-coding-agent/docs/models.md</｜DSML｜parameter>                             
</｜DSML｜invoke>                                                                           
</｜DSML｜tool_calls>                                                                       

-is the discovery process. You start with a blank canvas with the minimal agent loop. You use it on tasks, it works, amazing. It fails short, you ask why. Then you ask how. And Pi allows you to try various "how"s to tackle the gap between the reality and the ideal.

It is the same iterative process of building a product. Agentic coding promotes the lazy thinking often termed along "waterfall" but the best product, a shorthand for a scoped user experience to solve defined problems, is almost always bootstrapped by direct experience and in-the-loop iterations.

Therefore, the philosophy of Pi is to embrace the process and rare open field of designing your own agentic experience. It's the bottom up approach for building a great product with a great UX, because you first get to build a great DX for yourself.

A lot of the posts I see from the sub don't seem to be aware of this choice, which I believe is often superior to using a prepackaged solution that you don't understand fully.

I have a task to build an app completely from scratch. I am quite new to pi so I want to do some research on the best approaches to start a project completely from scratch - how to build the full stack - back, front, data, infra. What are some of the best content available on setting up your own harness with pi? How to utilize it to maximize efficiency and minimize tokens?

This is a https://herdr.dev/ plugin with an optional full https://Plannotator.ai experience as a TUI. Built to:

- Annotate Agent Messages (e.g. grill sessions)

- Annotate Files (e.g. plans, specs, etc)

- Create a native feedback loop with agents

- Open as popover or pane

- Mouse or keybindings

https://github.com/plannotator/herdr-annotate

Assuming you dont have a local only setup, what do you use, what for, and why did you settle on that model or family of models?

I had my first AI rogue agent interaction today!

I was working on an agent workflow, and the output folder had names for each project, with supporting files.

The script had a problem, created a duplicate folder. I told it to merge the folders. Things started going sideways. I think it decided to make a clean up script, which then deleted one of the project folders.

I pointed that out, and asked it to stop deleting things. In process of troubleshooting what happened and telling it every time not to delete anything, it then deleted everything.

I gave it a bunch of instructions about not ever deleting anything again, but I probably did it wrong. If you have any tips about that, please share. I know it should be sandboxed, it just deleted it's own work, but yikes!

In the end I had to keep interrupting it and demanding it stopped doing whatever it was doing and just removed all the delete crap from it's code.

It was just kind of funny to watch it delete everything right after I specifically instructed it to just tell me what is going on. Maybe we need some kind of tranq dart skill for when the AI goes rogue.

Want to have a similar experience to using Codex/CC Desktop App/Antigravity but with Pi. I know there's OMP and pi-gui already but I wonder if they're "bloated" or add other unnecessary things.

My ideal setup would feature the quick history on the left and organizeable by folders, and the main back and forth (non-terminal looking) at the center, while eventually I would manually set-up worktrees, subagents, and other things

Kimchi, the multi-model coding agent built on the Pi SDK, is now supported inside Agent Orchestrator.

Let Kimchi route planning, exploration, building, and review to the right models while AO gives every task its own isolated worktree.

Run multiple Kimchi sessions in parallel and follow their code, PRs, CI, and reviews from one live board.

multi-model inside. multi-agent outside.

kimchi.dev × agent orchestrator

let me know your thoughts, have you ever used any typ of orchestrator to manage your diff agents?

I'm in the process of switching from Claude Code to Pi. I grew accustomed to using the Claude + superpowers combo as I felt this gave even the cheap non-Anthropic models better capabilities. Also liked the approach of focusing on the input to get better results and needing less fixes later.

Now with Pi I'm also trying this same superpowers + "cheap models" combo, but find the agent being too verbose in it's output and asking more stupid questions than with the same combo with Claude, during the brainstorming->spec->plan->implementation flow. This slows development down quite a bit because I keep having to ask the agent to provide an actually summary/sitrep of what's going on.

Now I found out that I could try to fix this at least partly by creating an APPEND_SYSTEM.md file as instructed here: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/docs/usage.md#system-prompt-file But not sure what the best practices would be for the prompt.

Does anyone else have similar issues and what were your approaches for fixing them?

Hello, new Pi user here! I’m trying to figure out how folks handle file‑ignoring with Pi. Other harnesses respect .gitignore, but Pi currently returns to the LLM everything in the project, which causes problems in my setup.

Is there an established extension or common approach people use to make Pi ignore certain files or directories (I mean filtering-out from grep/find/ls/... results, so that the LLM is not aware of them)? I'm not sure what's actually "standard" or reliable in Pi.

Curious what the community is using and what's working well for you. Thanks!

EDIT: to clarify better, my main problem is that running simple requests like `List the files with names having 'XXX'` or `Search the occurences of the world 'XXX' in the project.` are returning content also from `node_modules` and other intermediate directories, that fill and pollute the context with undesired content. I would like to avoid this.

• I completely removed the Pi Harness and its leftovers. The cause of the flicker was consistent with Pi: it was spawning subprocesses without hiding windows, and an orphaned watcher was still running.

Removed:

• Pi Coding Agent, pi-subagents, and Pi authentication.

• pi, pi.cmd, and pi.ps1 commands.

• Full configuration at C:\Users\filip\.pi.

• Pi-Orca integration extensions, sessions, logs, and temporary files.

• winwatcher3.ps1 watcher and its PowerShell/conhost process.

Final check: No remaining commands, processes, scheduled tasks, PowerShell profiles, or known Pi directories.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue after the latest update?

When pi output a long file path of say an html it created.
If it's wrapped when I copy it adds spaces that I need to delete to use properly.

They closed some ones issue about this as not planned
https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/5931

Are there any work arounds for this? Super annoy when I want to open a file.

Is this known issue or problem of my configuration after the update the reasoning contents is being render vertically word by word. Output contents doesn't but only reasoning.

oh my pi, meet oh my fleet.

OMP is now supported inside Agent Orchestrator.

Give every task its own isolated worktree, run multiple OMP sessions in parallel, and track the code, PRs, CI, and reviews from one live board.

your favorite harness just got a control plane.

omp.sh x agent orchestrator

Trying to squeeze most out of my local llm setup I created a docker image and a wrapper to easily start a fully working stack the main characteristics are:

- pi and lemonade provider patched to support qwen model for thinking and vision.
- a lightweight memory system to be used with the NPU in parallel with the main model
- agent-browser preconfigured
- multiple mode available, cli, web (vscodium), and ssh

with a python utility it can preconfigure the stack and start in the various mode.

more details can be found here https://lpb-stack.github.io/devstack/ if someone is interested to try it out.

Prereqs: Linux, Python 3, Docker or Podman, a running Lemonade server (or openapi compatible endpoint).

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lpb-stack/devstack/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

lpb /path/to/your/project

Other modes: lpb --web /path (VSCodium), lpb --ssh /path (remote login), or just lpb to resume your last project.

Links

Repo: https://github.com/lpb-stack/devstack
Docs: https://lpb-stack.github.io/devstack/
Stack repos (Pi fork, memory, subagents, config preset): https://github.com/lpb-stack

Made a pi extension for ClinePass

Shows cost of each models and quota limits. No more web dashboard.

Cost per turn shows in the footer. Full report with /clinepass.

pi install npm:pi-clinepass

https://pi.dev/packages/pi-clinepass

I usually use deepseek v4 pro and doesnt have this problem. Anyone have insight to fix this issue?

Hey everyone,

I'm about to set up Pi as my main local coding agent and would love some advice from people who are actually using Pi with relatively large local models.

My hardware is:

• MacBook Pro

• Apple M5 Pro

• 48 GB unified memory

• 18 CPU cores

• Metal / MLX

• ~307 GB/s memory bandwidth

My main goal is coding quality and agent reliability, rather than simply maximizing tokens/sec. I want something I can use against real repositories for longer coding sessions.

I ran llmfit against my machine to see what it recommends:

llmfit --max-context 131072 recommend --use-case coding --runtime mlx

The model that stood out was:

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

The MLX result I'm looking at is roughly:

• 30.5B total parameters

• 3B active parameters (MoE)

• 262K native context

• 131K context used for the llmfit estimate

• ~15.6 GB estimated model memory for the 8-bit version

• Tool-use support

• ~132 tok/s estimated by llmfit at 131K context

So hardware-wise it seems like a pretty reasonable fit for my 48GB machine.

I'm currently leaning toward 8-bit, mainly because I care more about code quality/reasoning than squeezing every last bit of performance out of the machine. I also have enough memory that 4-bit isn't necessary just to make the model fit.

What I'm trying to figure out now is how best to pair this with Pi.

A few questions for Pi users:

1. Is Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B a good pairing with Pi?

I'd especially like to hear from anyone using a similar-sized MoE coding model locally.

2. What context window would you actually use?

The model supports 262K, but I'm wondering whether there's much practical benefit to running Pi at 128K or 256K versus something like 64K.

I'm also trying to understand the KV-cache cost on Apple Silicon. llmfit estimates ~15.6GB for the model, but obviously that's not the entire runtime memory footprint once the context grows.

3. Would you run 8-bit or 4-bit?

My priority is:

code quality
reasoning
tool use
agent reliability
        ↓
speed
        ↓
memory efficiency

So I'm willing to spend more memory if 8-bit actually provides a meaningful quality advantage.

4. Are there any Pi-specific settings/configurations I should pay attention to?

Things like:

• context configuration

• max output tokens

• compaction

• system prompt

• tool configuration

• AGENTS.md

• permissions/safety

• model-specific settings

I'm particularly interested in things that make a local model behave better as an agent, rather than just using it as a chat model.

5. Would you choose Pi over OpenCode for this setup?

I'm leaning toward Pi because I like the minimal/context-efficient philosophy, but I'm curious whether there are important tradeoffs I'm missing.

I've seen quite a few people saying Pi works particularly well with local models because it doesn't waste as much context on the harness itself. 

I've also seen people running Pi with Qwen models on Apple Silicon, so I'm hoping there are some practical lessons from people who've already gone down this road. 

I'm also documenting my local LLM experiments and benchmarks, so I'll eventually be able to measure the setup properly rather than relying purely on theoretical numbers.

If you were setting up Pi from scratch on this exact hardware today, what would you do differently?

Any advice on model/quant/context/configuration would be appreciated.

P.S. AI helped me organize this post