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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#101

Post by pavo-etc »

sroerick wrote: post #94
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

Yes they fit well together. The XMPP clients I've used have great protocol interaction but the UIs have been surprisingly janky. There are so many messaging apps to steal design cues from, yet the "popular" open source clients haven't really done this. I've started my own forks for converse.js and conversations.im to add some UI polish.

Funny that the XMPP clients has taken more of my time than the pi XMPP wrapper itself.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#102

Post by kamikazechaser »

If using outside of subscriptions, It is almost a no brainer to use this simple because of the efficiency. With subscriptions, not so good. Even the officially endorsed OpenAI integration lacks support for server-side context compaction (without a separate plugin which still triggers the pi native compaction).

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#103

Post by danslo »

thehours wrote: post #100
danslo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Oh, I stand corrected. It's been a while since I've used their models.

Glad we can still use OpenAI subscription through Pi.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#105

Post by pkulak »

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…

Same here, though I use Matrix and only have two agents. One for me, one for the family. They are mostly for household management tasks, but mine has an ssh key that lets it remote in to some of my servers and deal with stuff.

That said, I really don’t like “developing” over chat. I’d much rather wait until I’m really available to inspect diffs properly and watch all the thinking and tool use, real time.

https://github.com/pkulak/nix/tree/main/modules/features/ope...

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#106

Post by matthews3 »

malisper wrote: post #3

Having 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…

If you like Emacs, why not make Emacs your harness?

https://github.com/karthink/gptel

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#107

Post by colinmarc »

thehours wrote: post #100
danslo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I use my Anthropic subscription with Pi. I thought they would start charging me API usage at some point, but it never happened. (If it did happen, I would switch to open weights models.)

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#108

Post by anon-torment »

HDBaseT wrote: post #31
malisper wrote: post #3

Having 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…

Other harnesses tend to have 20k tokens in their system prompt and too many tools, and that drags them down.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#109

Post by berserkin1337 »

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.

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