i also found re context window: less is more
at least with GPT 5.6 Sol fwiw
https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/
sh is all you need
Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
51–60 of 307 posts
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#52The 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.
Yeah, I think Pi is good to use now because the AI has became so good that they almost can run on their own. Previously, AI agents do so many dumb and expected things that I really didn’t want to let them run on a loose leash and manual+automatic approval helped me steer them better. Even now, sometimes agents in Pi do things that startled me when I realized I didn’t explicitly approve that!
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#53If someone has never used Pi, what's a good starting point where someone took Pi and started adding some extensions etc to get to that minimal-but-useful-and-productive-for-coding state? Is there such recipe/writeup?
You can just fire it up and ask it to suggest some, or look on the site at the most downloaded and see which sound useful to you. That's basically what I did. I also put in some work to containerize it and do some manual/automatic checks to lock down extensions a bit, but that's just me.
It really doesn't take much for it to be useful, maybe something to search the web?
If you want you can just tell it to write you extensions too, like one to wrap curl so it can get to the web easier for instance. Or just tell it to use curl, really up to you. Just an example to point out: like, do whatever, it's very flexible.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#54i also found re context window: less is more at least with GPT 5.6 Sol fwiw https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ sh is all you need
Do you use smol? How do you find it compares to other harnesses for things like MCP connections? I’m tempted to use it since I’m a fan of the philosophy.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#55Pi does one thing that I love, developing a tool that has minimalism where it's easily configurable with good documentation. The leads to new use cases that the the author(s) would have never dreamed of. The organic growth process of the Pi ecosystem has been fascinating to observe. It's one of the reasons why Pi has become one of my favorite coding agents to this day, flexible beyond personal uses and extensible to larger environments.
IMO, I view it more than a coding agent, it's a coding agent platform with powerful extensibility.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#56If someone has never used Pi, what's a good starting point where someone took Pi and started adding some extensions etc to get to that minimal-but-useful-and-productive-for-coding state? Is there such recipe/writeup?
It's already in that minimal but useful state so you can just start and ask it to write code.
If you want a more tricked out "starter pack" there's oh-my-pi or lazypi and maybe a few others. But worth being careful what you install because 1. A full pack of extensions can destroy the minimalism of pi 2. Random extentions are a security nightmare.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#57Having tried all the coding harnesses, I find that using Pi is exactly like using Emacs. For anything you want to build you can ask your agent and it will build it. There's tons of existing code to help you configure it. At the same time half the code is buggy, UI elements will try to overlap one another, and you'll periodically get crashes. If you're willing to put in the work to master the learning curve and push t…
I don't really get this philosophy, at least with coding harnesses. I don't want to spend 2 hours prompting, configuring and fixing features that I need which are standard in every other harness. I don't really want to be wasting my tokens to make an application function like every other harness. I don't really want to have to repeat the cycle on every machine I want to work with. Every VM, every server, every laptop…
If you want something that's like every other harness then what's the point of considering pi? It's specifically for people who are dissatisfied with other harnesses.
Also, you can version control your tweaks and easily sync with other machines, just like any code.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#58Aside 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?
A lot of harnesses compress the context when it becomes massive, Pi doesn't do that out of the box (EDIT: that's wrong, as pointed out below). It can be both good and bad. Also since it doesn't have a lot of tools out of the box, the context is not polluted with external tool call descriptions that the agent has to be aware of. Basically, it doesn't handle the context "better", it barely does anything special to it,…
Pi has auto compaction enabled by default:
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#59If someone has never used Pi, what's a good starting point where someone took Pi and started adding some extensions etc to get to that minimal-but-useful-and-productive-for-coding state? Is there such recipe/writeup?
Mario recommends you don't do that.
You could try ohmypi but it sort of misses the point.
Why not just install nicopreme's pi-subagents and pi-web-access and then install whatever else you need when you find it's missing?
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#60Having tried all the coding harnesses, I find that using Pi is exactly like using Emacs. For anything you want to build you can ask your agent and it will build it. There's tons of existing code to help you configure it. At the same time half the code is buggy, UI elements will try to overlap one another, and you'll periodically get crashes. If you're willing to put in the work to master the learning curve and push t…
Never learned Emacs but am a Neovim user. But similar to what I said to my colleagues as well. Codex, Claude Code are VS Code, Jetbrain. Pi is Neovim.
It's funny you say this, because as someone that rejected emacs (default editor was XEmacs on the Sun machines in my 90s CS computer lab) in favor of vim early. I think a big part of the appeal of vim for me is that it's a great editor just based on the defaults. Sure you can configure it but you don't need to. Emacs strength is customization, and that's what Pi feels like compared to batteries-included harnesses.
I understand both world views and both are legitimate. But I do feel like LLMs are advancing so quickly that it's not a good use of my time to optimize harnesses at this point. I have actual work to do, so sharpening my tools needs to be selective and time-boxed. Personally I'm staying agnostic on harness, not locking into Codex or Claude Code, but also not prematurely optimizing things that tens of thousands of other tools-focused developers are going deep on across the ecosystem. My goal is not to be an early adopter but to reap the benefits of all that experimentation.