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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

earendil.com

11–20 of 307 posts

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#11
I often find it reductive when people say "just tell Pi to build you an extension". Having used it as my one and only harness for a few months now, it's easy to get an extension, but hard to get a good one, that actually works well and helps.

My advice: focus on getting work done and slowly adapt Pi with small augmentations as you go. You can start getting work done on vanilla setup. When the right idea comes along, try it. Be ready to refine it, and most importantly, rollback the addition. I've rolled back a bunch.

Many "batteries" that are "included" come from speculative and half-baked ideas, from people who were excited about something at some point in their journey. In practice, those ideas may not bring the desired results, and their creator may've moved on already. So it's better to either learn very well established tools, or mold your own slowly.

For example, many automatic memory systems are not helpful. I built a small extension that asked me whether it should remember something (and write it down to a properly scoped SKILL or AGENTS file). Turned out I accepted less than 5% of suggestions. Most were useless one-offs that would pollute the context. Can't imagine how much crap would accumulate if I wasn't in the loop.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#12

We built our first version of our in-app agent with opencode, but we're probably going to switch to Pi. Fundamentally, Pi is the shape of the thing that should exist, and it's awesome to see that it works. Very satisfying to my engineering brain. Been having fun with ohmypi as my personal harness, but going to switch over to pi soon and just mess around with it until it works the way I want. The idea of completely pe…

Haven't heard of ohmypi, thanks! I feel like this is a good starting point for someone like me who is not ready to configure a harness from zero right now.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#13
post #4

Literally every AI project ends up getting monetized even (read: especially) if it starts as open source. It's only a matter of time before π's enshittification kicks in.

Eh, it's open source. If its closed, fork it, move on. It's entire raison d'etre is to have a very minimal core so it's nature is that the base product isn't actually where the magic exists, but in the extensibility and the ecosystem. It'd be very tough to close that back down now that it's open.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#14
The biggest issue with Pi is that they don't have proper sandboxing with auto approval. Most solutions are third party and half baked. You have to either choose between just auto approval (no sandboxing), or a Claude/Codex style sandbox but manual approval.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#15
Honestly I think the thing I love most about Pi is that I'm not dealing with a tool with a thousand undiscovered features. I either pick and install what I want from the package ecosystem or I bottle up my own workflows into extensions as I find what works best for me.

The result is that the tool gradually morphs into the thing I need rather than me having to adapt myself to whatever new thing Anthropic or OpenAI comes up with.

I can also feel confident that the thing it becomes is what I actually need and not what maximizes token usage...

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#16
post #11

I often find it reductive when people say "just tell Pi to build you an extension". Having used it as my one and only harness for a few months now, it's easy to get an extension, but hard to get a good one, that actually works well and helps. My advice: focus on getting work done and slowly adapt Pi with small augmentations as you go. You can start getting work done on vanilla setup. When the right idea comes along,…

I have the same opinion as your first paragraph, but I don't want to spend weeks or months vibe-coding basic features which come built into almost every other agent.

Yeah maybe Claude/OpenCode/KiloCode/Hermes/whatever are not as minimal as Pi but they also work right now.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#17
post #11

I often find it reductive when people say "just tell Pi to build you an extension". Having used it as my one and only harness for a few months now, it's easy to get an extension, but hard to get a good one, that actually works well and helps. My advice: focus on getting work done and slowly adapt Pi with small augmentations as you go. You can start getting work done on vanilla setup. When the right idea comes along,…

I have the same opinion as your first paragraph, but I don't want to spend weeks or months vibe-coding basic features which come built into almost every other agent. Yeah maybe Claude/OpenCode/KiloCode/Hermes/whatever are not as minimal as Pi but they also work right now.

We probably differ a lot in what we consider "basic". Are subagents basic? I found them only useful in very few situations. Is LSP support basic? There are mixed results on whether it helps or hurts. Are multiple choice asking tools basic? I found that they add extra unnecessary ceremony, eat extra context, and I almost never answer with one of the choices exactly.

And if you try vanilla Pi, you will also find out that it works right now.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#19
post #14

The biggest issue with Pi is that they don't have proper sandboxing with auto approval. Most solutions are third party and half baked. You have to either choose between just auto approval (no sandboxing), or a Claude/Codex style sandbox but manual approval.

The secret here is giving pi its own user account on your machine, using Unix permissions.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#20
post #14

The biggest issue with Pi is that they don't have proper sandboxing with auto approval. Most solutions are third party and half baked. You have to either choose between just auto approval (no sandboxing), or a Claude/Codex style sandbox but manual approval.

I started treating my developer workstations like cattle. With a press of a button I can turn a vanilla Ubuntu 22.04.04 server install into my happy-place developer environment. Tools, code, browser -- everything set up exactly the way I want it. I have it synced to a couple of different laptops, and a separate boot drive from my desktop machine. It has a restricted set of SSH keys, and I push code to a separate upstream.

If YOLO MODE causes pi to destroy my workstation (it hasn't yet) I'll just nuke the thing from orbit and spin up a new one.

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