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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#121

Post by rcarmo »

kamikazechaser wrote: post #102

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).

I added that in https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw a few weeks back. The reason it’s not in pi-ai is that server-side OpenAI compaction is encrypted/opaque and (at least in my experience) can cause issues when switching models.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#122

Post by pavo-etc »

pkulak wrote: post #105
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://gith…

If I wanted to be inspecting diffs I would tell it to put up a PR and then i'd review it in the GitHub app.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#124

Post by imtringued »

Onavo wrote: post #14

The 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.

Correct. pi.dev is not a minimal coding agent. It already comes with crazy amounts of preconceptions baked in.

For example, it comes with a bash tool built that you cannot disable. This is not minimal, it's the full kitchen sink. If I want to build a custom agent I have to literally stop using pi.dev and switch to something else.

So yeah, I fully disagree with the title. "Pi’s Minimalism Is Its Advantage" No. full stop. It's too bloated for me already. It's not minimal enough. If it's minimalism was its strength. it might not even need a sandbox, because it can't run bash commands or update files to begin with.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#125

Post by thepasch »

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?

Not if you run your own system prompt that does not explicitly contain the term "pi coding agent". Perhaps they string-match against some other stuff, too, but as long as you paraphrase the system prompt a bit, you should be fine.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#126

Post by imtringued »

frogperson wrote: post #23
Onavo wrote: post #14

The 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.

You might appreciate https://nono.sh/ Its very easy to use and has a pre-made profile for pi. Just do something like `alias pi="nono run -v --profile pi --allow-cwd -- /opt/homebrew/bin/pi"` in your shell.

[dead]

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#127

Post by schneehertz »

orliesaurus wrote: post #47

If 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?

Just install Pi and start using it directly, no extensions needed for Pi to get the job done.

Only when you genuinely find a feature is missing should you write one yourself or have Pi write an extension or skill for you.

Don't use extensions written by others, after all, those extensions were also vibe-coded.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#128

Post by whazor »

rcarmo wrote: post #120
whazor wrote: post #113

Both Codex and Claude have trained their models to their harnesses. There are some experimentations by Igor Warzocha to extract Codex shapes and put it in Pi: https://github.com/IgorWarzocha/howaboua-pi-stuff/tree/main/... I'm expecting every model will have a fine tuned Pi extension at some point.

I’ve been using both families of models inside pi/piclaw ( https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/ ) and I assure you they work _better_ in that environment than in the originals. The models are not trained to the harnesses, the harnesses provide cues that the models follow.

You can see the approach in his post: https://howaboua.dev/writing/how-i-gave-pi-17-tools-without-...

The result: 38% fewer startup tokens, 17 tools exposed through just three schemas, and 19 skills loaded only when needed.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#129

Post by veber-alex »

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…

You can fork a conversation in Claude as well.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#130

Post by paldepind2 »

Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion. Given all the hype, I was a bit underwhelmed by Pi. It definitely has some good ideas around customization, but it annoyed me in many little ways.

For a program that's minimal it sure takes a long time to start up, the standard C-p and C-n bindings don't work, it doesn't follow the XDG Base Directory Specification and just pollutes my $HOME directory.

I think there's still space for another harness that's 1/ open-source, 2/ written in a fast compiled language (Rust, Go, etc.) and scriptable in a simple (aka non-JS) scripting language (Lua, etc.), 3/ less opinionated and more sensible so things like XDG isn't a WONTFIX.

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