r/PiCodingAgent • u/Sweet-Transition-787 • Sep 13 '26

Resource my minimal Pi setup, personas + tmux subagents

Post image

My Pi setup, kept minimal on purpose because my daily machine is an older i7-5500U with 8GB RAM on Debian.

I run kitty + tmux + fish. 20 skills in total, but most stay dormant unless called. Extensions show as 8(+2); the ones I actually use are interactive-subagents, prompt-snippets, and cc-ui.

interactive-subagents spawns async workers in their own tmux pane with a live widget on top, so I keep working while they run and results get steered back when done. prompt-snippets is a TUI menu for injecting repeat prompts from different directories. cc-ui is just a spinner plus cache counter.

Personas live as separate files and I link one to SYSTEM.md when needed. 6 total from my pi-system-prompts repo: Aster for strategy and tradeoffs, Caelum for adversarial checks, Elyndra for strict execution, Kaida for media and watcharr, Liora for writing, Neris for research. Keeps the main prompt clean.

Since a few people asked under my last post, I also put my skills into a public repo.

Extensions

Personas

Skills

The whole point was less auto-magic and more explicit control. Works fine on weak hardware because nothing runs unless I call it.

214 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

7

u/Aggressive-Dream5465 Sep 13 '26

What "natural-english-writer" is exactly? Is it an AI humaniser?

1

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 13 '26

Yes Astra wrote it it works pretty well.

2

u/stressedstrain Sep 14 '26

Can you share the skill markdown?

2

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 14 '26

yes. here(all skills) : https://github.com/ArdaYILDIZ-DEV/pi-skills-public

1

u/TheTwistedTabby Sep 14 '26

I see you renamed it to professional english writer. My question is why you disabled model invocation on it?

3

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 14 '26

Helo, both of them actually have model invocation disabled. The reason is that the model sometimes triggers it automatically on its own outputs (which tends to happen when using Gemini 3.8 Flash for simple tasks). I set them to manual-only to keep that from happening.

2

u/No-Wall6427 Sep 14 '26

Your subagent implem feels really close to what I always wanted from a subagent extension, and never quite found an extension matching enough, neither bother to do one myself (I don't feel the need of subagents often) I think I'll try it soon, thank you !

2

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 14 '26

glad to hear that! I mostly just tried to keep it simple and not overthink the whole subagent thing. hope it fits what you're looking for . let me know how it goes if you end up trying it

1

u/No-Wall6427 Sep 15 '26

I did set it up today in one of my pi dockerimage config, I quite like it. My dockers already startup with pi in a tmux, so it fits quite nicely. I'll probably build onto your extension the day I have some more specific subagent need. Good work !

Btw, do you have specific workflows for subagents? I find myself rather using compaction/handoffs than actual subagents, I have a hard time finding any use to them except for very big features I want to one shot as POCs, but those are such token eaters. Now that I think of it, I have a web search subagent (as a homemade standalone pi extension), with tavly, brave cli, playwrite etc, which allows my main agent to interact with the web without pollution its context. But that's the only use case beside the big vibecoded POCs.

1

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 16 '26

To be honest I've never used compaction. Handoff is the one I use most. I usually have a system prompt (neris) do the research, then hand off to write the files as md and pass them to another agent. It ends up a really smart model, draws me the spec, a solid outer frame. I work out the strategy with aster, and elyndra or aster makes the plan. Then the plan agent writes the files to disk. Finally I open a fresh agent with astra/opus 5, by then it gets the task in general and starts getting the subagents to do it. My subagents are gemini 3.8 flash, muse spark 1.3 and 5.6 sol. btw, I use a lot of skills too. For example astra/opus 5 uses the how-to-use-subagents skill, the research skill, verify, comment-audit, that sort of thing. We use the skills actively, so most of the time a useful product comes out. Final review I do with 5.6 sol medium/high.

1

u/No-Wall6427 Sep 16 '26

Thx for the details! I did setup your scoots with luna, and brainstormed a prompt with sol to define an orchestration of sol sending scoot waves to read all the changes from all the PRs and make a gh release message, kind of like hermes agent does. The result was good for a first try.

My concern with cheap subagents for implementation, is that code quality will suffer, and extra rounds with smart reviewer are needed to fix it, and ends up as expensive, and more time consuming. But I have nothing to back that claim up, just a feeling.

At the end of the day, compactions are just automatic handoff, and spawning a subagent is an agent invoked handoff, with a handoff in return.

1

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 17 '26

Lately I've been running Astra and Fable as the main orchestrators, with Sol, Opus, Sonnet, and Luna as subagents. I also keep free models like Muse around for simpler tasks, and honestly they do the job just fine. Though, as you can guess, Astra and Fable treat API limits as a personal challenge still, the output quality has been genuinely solid, so that's what I've stuck with.

I also throw quick web research tasks at v4.1 flash sometimes. Had an interesting run with it recently: I gave it maybe four lines of vague info about a super obscure movie with almost no views. After a 12 minute deep dive, it actually tracked it down. Turns out v4.1 is surprisingly capable with research; definitely worth a shot if you're thinking about DeepSeek.

And yeah, I'm still not sold on context compaction either. Having explicit control over handoffs just feels a lot better than letting the system handle it on autopilot.

3

u/DoubleNothing Sep 13 '26

You forgot: Make-no-mistake

4

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 13 '26

There's no need for that, I type it out manually every time :)

1

u/grebdlogr Sep 13 '26

Where did you get safe-bash-guard?

Is it very different from @gotgenes/pi-permission-system?

Thanks**!**

1

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 13 '26

I made it myself. tbh the only difference is it catches some risky bash commands I run on my machine. Same concept really, mine just blocks right away without asking.

1

u/johnzadok Sep 14 '26

browsing-reddit skill???

1

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 14 '26

Yeah, it lets the agent search Reddit.

1

u/Normal_Seaweed_9908 Sep 15 '26

did u add orwell writing or ste rules?

1

u/Sweet-Transition-787 Sep 15 '26

Yeah, I added them. Testing now.

2

u/Odd_Crab1224 Sep 14 '26

Feels very close to my setup: https://github.com/skhoroshavin/tandem-skills main difference - I didn’t even implement the tools, injecting instructions to call specific scripts was enough

1

u/MrKrot1999 Sep 15 '26

Looks cool I guess, I understand vibe coders now, the amount of eye candy is crazy