I love using Pi and its design philosophy. The minimalism is what resonates with me. It just works, update after update.
Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
81–90 of 307 posts
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#82I love Pi . I have been building an agent using its agent harness https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/agen... . I love the simplicity .
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#83I'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…
Interesting, I would be interested to read more about your setup and workflow
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#84Pi Agent has been one of my favorite harness when it comes to using with local models
I had a lot of success running it on my Mac with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#85I 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. https://github.com/autohandai/code-cli
What it hints at is the direction of model agnostic and custom agents. I could see companies using Pi to create a product for orgs, for example. Low cost and closer to the customer needs than a general harness.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#86Having 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…
I'm the opposite. I started out promising myself I'd install all those handy looking plugins (I had like 20 I wanted to try out). But I've been slippery sloped into building my own Pi extensions and reinventing the wheel many, many times. It's been months and I love it. I just keep discovering and learning, and forgetting, and doing it all over again. I've been building my own harnesses since before that word was so common though, even before Aider was released.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#87I 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. https://github.com/autohandai/code-cli
I've read this before. Marketing?
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#88I built Fusion (software factory) on top of Pi and have been thrilled with it https://github.com/Runfusion/Fusion
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#89I'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…
Interesting, I would be interested to read more about your setup and workflow
I plan to do a writeup once I've got a few more of the kinks out with consistent cross agent comms. Message routing happens in-band right now, not too big a problem since 95% of the messages are DMs to me but once I'm running more in parallel I'm sure they'll have some more cross agent communication issues.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#90Aside 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?
The /tree feature is incredible for context management. It's really surprising the other harnesses haven't slurped it up yet. It lets you rewind back to any previous message and fork the conversation from there, removing your 'side quest' (e.g. where you dig into something the agent said) from the context. Some other harnesses have a 'rewind' feature, but this lets you maintain the previous conversation history in a separate thread, and even jump between them.