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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

earendil.com

21–30 of 307 posts

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#21
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.

This is also by design. Pi assumes you’re a power user and you know what you you’re doing and what you want. If sandboxing and the security that Claude and codex offer is something you truly need, pi might not be for you and that’s okay.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#23
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.

You might appreciate https://nono.sh/

Its very easy to use and has a pre-made profile for pi. Just do something like `alias pi="nono run -v --profile pi --allow-cwd -- /opt/homebrew/bin/pi"` in your shell.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#25
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.

Mario talked about the Earendil transition in his blog post here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/

Him and Armin especially, have been involved in OSS for years and have worked hard to build communities around projects they’ve built and maintained. We’ve all seen enough projects become what you’re afraid of, Mario included. I’m optimistic that they’ll keep true to their goal of keeping pi open while building their other products around it. I think they understand the community dynamics necessary to keep a project like pi going. And they want it to succeed that way.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#26

I've had a lot of success running Pi on my server in headless mode and wrapping it in an XMPP client. This means I can talk to it wherever I can access XMPP (everywhere). It also mean agents can talk to each other when they need to. They've got a shared wiki they interact with and github issues as their todo list. I am running several named pi instances in parallel in their own user account on NixOS, so they can inst…

Out of curiosity, do you use the pi-xmpp[1] extension or do you have your own?

[1]: https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#27
Aside from the minimal system prompt, how does it handle context better than other agents? It still has to send the system prompt (which includes AGENTS.md and skill definitions) along with the full conversation every request, no?

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#28
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.

My very first request, after reading this thread and deciding to try pi out--it went out of the app directory it started in, and made code edits to a sibling directory in a different git project repo.

opencode has never done that.

I'm allured by the minimalism, so I didn't quit there, but I'm not keen on letting it loose with vague instructions, that's for sure.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#29
post #26

I've had a lot of success running Pi on my server in headless mode and wrapping it in an XMPP client. This means I can talk to it wherever I can access XMPP (everywhere). It also mean agents can talk to each other when they need to. They've got a shared wiki they interact with and github issues as their todo list. I am running several named pi instances in parallel in their own user account on NixOS, so they can inst…

Out of curiosity, do you use the pi-xmpp[1] extension or do you have your own? [1]: https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp

Initially I was using that extension but I ran into its limitations pretty quickly. Sometimes the agent wouldn't reply over XMPP, it didn't have any support for typing indicators or status messages, and it had no way to support inter-agent communication, the agent could only ever speak to the configured owner account. I also had no way of running system commands like /new over XMPP.

The headless pi + xmpp wrapper ended up working much better because the XMPP bridge is the only interface and I get full control over its capabilities.

This is my wrapper: https://github.com/zachpmanson/pi-msg

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#30
i really hope OpenCode v2 with the Effect internals can ascertain and realize and lock on to being the best extensibility platform, on to having a core that serves not just itself, it's conceits of/as product, but a wider world. a street that wants to "find it's own uses for things".

it feels like there's still a strong layer of "for us" vs "for you" within opencode, that i hope, over time can get chewed away at. plugins to rebuild history, to re-title are just impossible, for example. none of these changes, these freedoms are hard to release. the patches i juggle are easy. but whether or not my agentic software serves as a substrate for my desire, or whether it allows me to augment agency: tis the question.

Dax (opencode lead) has such humble takes, is so forthwith about trying failing trying again on and on. about iterative improvement. and it feels like the guts are so in line to deliver, to allow such freedom now in OpenCode. but i don't see the product (anti-product) alignment, where opencode understands that it's competition isn't cc or codex, which can't and won't ever really compete, but pi, that the competition is to be the putty, to deliver the agency, to be a substrate. really hoping, because i love opencode, and these internals in v2 are sick.

the "devtools must be open sourced" debate comes screaming into the fore on this. it certainly argues similar to the post here: that it is minimalism, it is adaptability, programmability, it is directability that unlocks and unleashes us:

> Imagine the convoluted misery it would be trying to plug that into the VS Code extensions API! Or trying to get it into vimdiff. It would certainly be possible, but the machinery to start pre-processing the commits as soon as they appear would be nigh-on impossible. - https://blog.exe.dev/devtools-must-be-open-source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111

i don't even fully agree! today more than ever, why not cut a VS Code extension? why not cut some wild coop.nvim async extension that runs whatever subprocesses, talks to whatever system daemon? dream it up and do it; the llm's will cut through the mechanicals. but the core point, about finding software that doesn't obstruct, that accelerates the human agency: it's so Douglas Engelbart. to Augment Agency is so close akin to Augment Intellect, the grand passion for human interest engagement envolvement constructivism fucking-around-and-finding-out. and my how unhindered we can be now. if only our tools/systems/softwares let us be. here's to you, soft software!

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