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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#131

Post by [deleted] »

pavo-etc wrote: post #122
pkulak wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#132

Post by intothemild »

paldepind2 wrote: post #130

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 d…

I really really like pi.

But I agree with you, it's biggest weakness is that for a real long time the tagline of it was "there are many harnesses, this one is MINE" (That being Mario's)

I have a lot of respect for Mario and his team, but there's things like you've pointed out that deviate from standards, and other issues that I've seen get posted, only to get knocked down by the team as WON'T FIX because, even though the new owners changed the tagline from MINE to YOURS... It's still very much Mario's.

I do like opinionated things. Truly. But I'm also of the opinion that standards exist for a reason.

That said. I like Pi so much that it's my daily driver, and I've created an ecosystem of plugins to do everything I want, having them all tie together and communicate through the shared bus. Pi is really a good harness.

It's just, well. I don't agree with some of the opinions.

If I'm going to add another thing here... Whilst you cannot get everything you need from the openAI API spec, you can get a surprising amount to get a model config. That said. Versions of Pi are still shipping with model configs for certain inference providers. I do hope that gets decoupled at some stage. I see the groundwork being laid.

So the work is being done in the right direction. I applaud the team but I do get the feeling that a lot of this is because people want to contribute, but the team really wants to hand craft this. And that's great

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#133

Post by oulipo »

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…

Would that have any real advantage over some "basic" setup (eg tmux running codex, and accessing it through SSH on the phone with Termius)?

I've been able to do 80% of what I needed to do remotely with that setup, so wondering if a more complex setup would really add much...

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#134

Post by kriro »

Philosophically, pi.dev is exactly what I'm looking for. Minimalist and explicit (YOLO by default, we know it can be trouble but we tell you so).

Anyone here using the Rust rewrite of pi.dev as their daily driver? It's endorsed by the author of pi.dev and looks pretty attractive to me being both minimalist and not having npm attached. Any info "from the trenches" are appreciated (setup with sandboxing, extra niceties etc).

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#137

Post by NoboruWataya »

paldepind2 wrote: post #130

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 d…

> 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.

This drives me mad, I believe Ollama and Claude Code also do this. Seems to be rife in the LLM world. IMO there's no excuse for new software sticking dotfiles in my homedir in 2026.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#138

Post by wongarsu »

paldepind2 wrote: post #111
timwis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do that in Copilot in VSCode. There’s a fork icon before every message that creates a new session from that point. The relationships are not maintained in a tree though (not sure if Pi does that).

Claude code in the cli also has /fork to clone the current session state. But if you use it more than once or twice that quickly becomes hard to manage. Actual tracking in a tree sounds like an awesome feature (and one that I love in conversational UIs like openwebui as well)

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#139

Post by mft_ »

I’m going to go against the grain and say that Pi is a little too minimal by default. The emacs comparison is interesting, but default Pi is like emacs that can load files but you’ve got to extend it manually to save or search within a file.

I’d argue that there’s a minimal set of functions that a coding harness needs to just enable a model to get stuff done, and they shouldn’t be an extra effort to set up.

(Oh-my-pi exists for those of a similar persuasion.)

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#140

Post by msdz »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #137
paldepind2 wrote: post #130

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 d…

> 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. This drives me mad, I believe Ollama and Claude Code also do this. Seems to be rife in the LLM world. IMO there's no excuse for new software sticking dotfiles in my homedir in 2026.

> IMO there's no excuse for new software sticking dotfiles in my homedir in 2026.

Agreed, and also, tinfoil hat time:

I believe they opt for this so that state and config files don’t need to be distinguished (it all goes into ~/.appname the same). It’s still not an excuse, but maybe laziness is the reason?

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