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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#141

Post by myaccountonhn »

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…

I've thought about using email and pi, as then the responses can be email patches I can inspect and it's easier to keep multiple threads going. But I've also thought that XMPP makes sense too, and is slightly easier to connect to a VPN rather than setting up mail.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#142

Post by mr_mitm »

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.

My impression is that it's the NodeJS, Go and Rust communities that don't care about XDG.

This 11 year old, open issue is very symptomatic of this IMHO: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/1734

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#143

Post by myaccountonhn »

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.

I just run it as a separate Unix user. Good enough for me.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#144

Post by LinXitoW »

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?

They had plans to do that for CLaude SDK and claude -p usage, but paused them indefinitely.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#145

Post by thehours »

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.

I've been satisfied with using Pi inside of srt [0].

I launch with `srt pi` and get file system and network isolation. There is a seemingly infinite risk surface area to protect, but I think does a reasonable job of balancing security and convenience.

I've also heard good things about nono [1] from colleagues, but I haven't personally tried it out yet.

[0] https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime

[1] https://github.com/nolabs-ai/nono

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#148

Post by Defletter »

msdz wrote: post #140
NoboruWataya wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ?

I'd also add that convenient recursive folder creation was only added relatively recent for many languages (eg: "std::filesystem::create_directories" was only added in C++17). And since "~/" is pretty much guaranteed to exist, the fewer folders you needed to create, the less code you had to write.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#149

Post by rkangel »

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.

I use OpenRouter, currently Kimi K3 which has been extremely effective.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#150

Post by rkangel »

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?

It is genuinely useful on its own. I have enjoyed discovering the things I want and adding them bit by bit.

I'm doing quite well with just a "todos" extension, and a "plan" prompt template (doesn't enforce read only tool usage, but prompts to build todos and discuss before doing anything).

I will probably try out some subagent systems soon, but I'm doing surprisingly well without them.

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