I use pi for agentic CI; reviews, etc.
It's so easy- npm install, a little markdown boot camp, and you get great results.
Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
71–80 of 307 posts
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use it for smaller changes (no compaction yet) If I have agents.md or other context I want it to read I mention it at the beginning of the session re MCP: I am not using an MCP with smol but there are ways to convert MCPs into CLI tools or typed js I imagine that would work well/more token efficient with smol (or most harnesses actually) The best thing I found so far re smol is that it fits into the context window…
I didn't realize you were the author. Super cool! I'll be trying it out. I do like the grug-brain approach of keeping things extremely simple and easy to reason about. One thing that I don't like about Pi is that it's almost too extensible, in the sense that I can add a lot of shit into it without really understanding what a given extension is doing. And both from a security and token efficiency standpoint, I like th…
I'm glad there are quite a few good open source ones by now.
Also happy with how much love codex gets from OpenAI.
That said: I was looking at existing agents to find one to build upon and to me they were all too complex and were leaning too heavily into 3rd party dependencies.
Nothing I could understand comfortably in an afternoon (that's also on me I guess). Pi was closest to what I was looking for but still too big and too modular.
(It's hard to come up with good abstractions that work well across all major models + keep up with new concepts that come and go all the time with new releases.)
The more complex agents err on the side of supporting many models 'ok' instead of focusing on taking advantage of a specific model.
With a tiny implementation it is easier to adapt it.
Adding new stuff, removing stuff again, changing it from working well specifically with GPT 5.6 Sol to working with the exact model I want.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#73Aside 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 few examples: 1) system prompt in pi is quite small (way smaller than the one from OpenCode) 2) when your agents.md file changes pi does not re-spam it (preserves cache, good trade-off!) 3) only 4 tools, every tool comes with a description for how to use it and causes reasoning overhead (fewer tools is good) all of these things add up here are pi, opencode and smol working on the same tasks in 9 fresh runs https://…
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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
> Are subagents basic? I found them only useful in very few situations. I've found them to be extraordinarily helpful, because they allow me to much more carefully control context and reduce token spend by using a smart model for the parent agent and cheap models for the subagents. Do you just have a big token budget?
I started out using OpenCode with subagents. Then, after switching to Pi, went completely subagentless, usually on the current frontier GPT model.
I didn't notice any significant change in context usage, and tasks were completed faster. That surprised me, I'm still not sure (not an expert on this), but maybe the handoff boundary was the problem. When the main model gives an isolated task to the subagent, the latter goes wild producing a comprehensive report, trying to satisfy every possibility. Without the handoff, the main model does the job much more precisely and conservatively, checks only specific/narrow things, and stops sooner.
Recently I decided to reintroduce 2 subagents to see how it goes. First was to have a cheaper model drive my real Safari browser instead of using agent-browser and the like. Second, to see if having a cheaper model navigate/search my file system helps in any way.
I think there's some benefit to having a cheap model drive Safari, because there's so much unavoidable garbage produced in that interaction. The filesystem one I don't think I see any benefit, just a lot of unnecessary work that (albeit cheap) wastes more time.
Of course I'm eyeballing this, not benchmarking formally, but I see so many people just onboard these mindlessly. Are you sure that you saw a real improvement in the produced outcomes/timing, or was it based on seeing subagents do a lot of stuff and assuming that the main model would've been doing the same at higher cost?
I admit that subagents may have great benefits, but I wouldn't treat it as just out-of-the-box basic feature that always improves your outcomes.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#75+1
#teampi
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#76Having 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.
I agree. Pi is more like NeoVim if we have to map to Vim/Emacs. Emacs is full (at least compared to Vim) of the hidden features you didn't know it had installed. Pi doesn't bundle any hidden features. A bog standard GNU Emacs install contains, what, like ~10 games, a mail reader, a web browser, RSS feed reader, a nd a Morse code decipher?
Even more so, Pi even has opinionated forks and "distributions" like oh-my-pi that are like LazyVim/AstroVim.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#77I'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…
> NixOS is the key to all of this, since agents can interact see the whole server config
We added native support for nixos for the same reason - malleability and debugging becomes easier (also because one of our customers asked us to). I think we might be the only sandbox provider to add this in warm pools.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#78I think for indie hackers and people that build their own stack is great, but real scenario and people with money Enterprise likes the idea of batteries included.
I found this one a little bit better and they do support Extensions like Pi. But comes with all features like codex, claude code and it's open-source.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#79I 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 couldn't agree more.
I think for indie hackers and people that build their own stack is great, but real scenario and people with money Enterprise likes the idea of batteries included.
I found this one a little bit better and they do support Extensions like Pi. But comes with all features like codex, claude code and it's open-source.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 end…
Thank you, that is very useful for my use case. Pi has transformed so much of my daily task, this will boost it a bit more. Much appreciated.