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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#91

Post by darkteflon »

pavo-etc wrote: post #10

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…

Interesting setup. Would you still have chosen a Wiki vs a folder of md files if all agents were using a shared filesystem / compute environment (eg personal computer)? I see Wikis often mentioned as shared state stores and I’m trying to figure out what makes people reach for them.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#92

Post by 1saadcodes »

This seems like a more natural use of agents than asking them to one shot and push to prod. Give them a measurable objective, let them experiment, and judge the outcome instead of the implementation. Similar to how you would deal with a junior or intern basically

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#93

Post by LaurensBER »

pornel wrote: post #18

I'm enjoying the maximal version: https://omp.sh

OMP is great to get started with, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there but it's mostly optional and turned off by default (like the memory backend). You can always try it and create a custom Pi config with only the stuff that you find useful if it's too much.

I'm really enjoying the advisor mode (you can have a second model monitor the output of the primary model and have it "steer" the primary when it makes a mistake or goes off the rails) and the automatic fallback to a second provider if the primary one has issues (Deepseek had some issues yesterday).

I need to dive a bit into the system prompt to see how much context OMP actually adds. I think the system prompt is still 2-3k tokens but that probably depends on bells and whistles.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#94

Post by sroerick »

pavo-etc wrote: post #10

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…

Pi and XMPP is excellent

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#95

Post by anon7000 »

timwis wrote: post #90
swingboy wrote: post #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?

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…

I think cursor has this where you can fork a thread from a previous message

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#96

Post by grewil2 »

Are all of you pi users paying Anthropic and OpenAI for API usage? Or can you combine pi with a subscription?

So far API usage is a lot more expensive than subscription and if you need better models than Deepseek and Kimi, and you are not wealthy, I don’t see a way around this.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#97

Post by danslo »

grewil2 wrote: post #96

Are all of you pi users paying Anthropic and OpenAI for API usage? Or can you combine pi with a subscription? So far API usage is a lot more expensive than subscription and if you need better models than Deepseek and Kimi, and you are not wealthy, I don’t see a way around this.

You can use both providers in Pi using subscriptions. Be careful with Anthropic though, it’s against their TOS.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#98

Post by pavo-etc »

darkteflon wrote: post #91
pavo-etc wrote: post #10

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…

Interesting setup. Would you still have chosen a Wiki vs a folder of md files if all agents were using a shared filesystem / compute environment (eg personal computer)? I see Wikis often mentioned as shared state stores and I’m trying to figure out what makes people reach for them.

When I say wiki I mean a folder of md files in a git repo. I only say wiki because it uses [[wikilink]] style links. Proper wiki software would be massively overkill for a project like this.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#100

Post by thehours »

danslo wrote: post #97
grewil2 wrote: post #96

Are all of you pi users paying Anthropic and OpenAI for API usage? Or can you combine pi with a subscription? So far API usage is a lot more expensive than subscription and if you need better models than Deepseek and Kimi, and you are not wealthy, I don’t see a way around this.

You can use both providers in Pi using subscriptions. Be careful with Anthropic though, it’s against their TOS.

Doesn’t using the Anthropic subscription this way get charged as extra usage, and thus effectively billed at API rates?
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