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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

earendil.com

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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#161

Post by 627467 »

nylonstrung wrote: post #147

Unrelated to Pi (which is great) can we please stop using LoTR names for companies. The Peter Thiel glazing/cargo culting is pretty cringe at this point

Example of how easily humans are biased by the bubble they live in and start projecting assumptions everywhere (seemingly against their own interest).

Please provide evidence of relationship of pi/earendil to peter thiel.

I also suggest that if you believe peter thiel relationship with anything is a nuisance then - maybe - try avoiding gut-assigning links of anything in the world to him. you maybe see things in more positive light and it would be fairer to those things.

Peter thiel doesnt own tolkien work. The world is bigger than one mans bias

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#162

Post by impulser_ »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #69
impulser_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the future will essentially be building extensions for agents. Agents will become the new web browser and extensions will be the new apps. We are already seeing the early stages of this.

how many extensions do you need for browsing the web? Adblocker. Not much else because the browser already does the important work. Same with any of the off the shelf harnesses. Go build something useful instead of tweaking the minutiae of the harness.

You don't need any extensions to use Pi. You can get far without any.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#163

Post by m4ns0ur »

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 love Pi and right now I'm developing a project like Pi, focused only on local inferences. https://github.com/m4ns0ur/iris

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#164

Post by ghm2199 »

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…

The fact that you can easily change the key bindings and $HOME and tons of other stuff by telling pi itself to go write an extension in 20 seconds(or just go customize one after forking it) is awesome, not because you can do it YOLO but because I could on-board faster with these and get to work ASAP.

I've been able to get near exactly the workflow I want: Navigate and search sessions, Delegated extensions that allow you to run deterministic code for sensitive operations like read, write and search-result inference, I have an extension to prune tool calls in batch mode: saves tons of context space on GPT-5.x trading off prompt prefix performance. And another one very similar to auto search mentioned in the blog. And the Tmux integration allows you to spin work trees in separate windows/panes.

I've never had a perf issue simply because harness interaction being a human in the loop process you(thinking and writing) are the bottleneck.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#165

Post by Philpax »

mr_mitm wrote: post #142
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.

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

In my experience, the Rust community very much cares - it is a struggle to find a modern Rust application of any popularity that does not abide by XDG.

.cargo's placement is a historical mistake that can't be undone now, but ecosystem participants are generally good participants.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#166

Post by imtringued »

josh_p wrote: post #21
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.

This is also by design. Pi assumes you’re a power user and you know what you you’re doing and what you want. If sandboxing and the security that Claude and codex offer is something you truly need, pi might not be for you and that’s okay.

This is backwards. If you're a power user you want full control over all the tools granted to the agent and not let the agent bypass them by using bash. It's the people who don't want to customize anything that don't care about letting the agent go haywire and just run whatever bash commands it needs in a sandbox.

Think about why a sandbox is needed: Your permissions have been too loose. You now need to deal with the fallout of your decision externally. If all the agent was allowed to do is read your files and run cargo test, you wouldn't need a sandbox at all, the agent is the sandbox.

Now you might say, but what if it needs to modify files? If you wanted to build a sandbox or approval workflow here, you'd put it right into your custom write tool. It could be an extension you just download so you can pick your favorite write tool. Instead, the authors of pi.dev chose the worst possible defaults.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#167

Post by senko »

Meta: this reads like a corporate article, info-selling a solution to enterprises. The style is a far cry from anything Mario or Armin usually write.

First indication of business strategy around Pi's reverse acquisition of Earendil, perhaps?

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#168

Post by imtringued »

tosh wrote: post #157
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…

smol is ~20 lines of Go, uses only stdlib but also highly opinionated (no mcps, no agents.md, no system prompt, …) so not sure it checks all of your boxes that said: because smol is so smol you can adapt it easily and agents (including smol) can work well with it because the whole implementation fits comfortabliy into the context window https://github.com/smol-env/smol

It's not 20 lines of Go because you decided to merge multiple lines of code into one. Why not advertise it as one line of code if you don't care about readability?

Here is my fork of smol, by the way:

https://pastebin.com/imdWVrQ2

Edit: after reading my fork of smol, I realized it literally just feeds everything into bash, making it completely pointless.

Edit 2: I decided to read the readme instead and it raised a question

"Compare smol with Pi, OpenCode, Codex, Hermes, Claude Code and highlight key pros and cons. Audit the code of all of them and tell me how confident you are that you found all potential issues of smol vs the other agent implementations?"

After thinking about the difference between the original and my fork, I'm confident that smol has more problems than all of the agent harnesses combined and my fork has made an important step towards fixing one of those issues.

Edit 3: I hope the community can fork my version and add sensible variable names.

Edit 4: I can't decide whether this is the best satire of coding agents I've ever seen and I just ruined it or it is horrifying that someone even entertains the idea of publishing it.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#169

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#170

Post by tosh »

imtringued wrote: post #168
tosh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

smol is ~20 lines of Go, uses only stdlib but also highly opinionated (no mcps, no agents.md, no system prompt, …) so not sure it checks all of your boxes that said: because smol is so smol you can adapt it easily and agents (including smol) can work well with it because the whole implementation fits comfortabliy into the context window https://github.com/smol-env/smol

It's not 20 lines of Go because you decided to merge multiple lines of code into one. Why not advertise it as one line of code if you don't care about readability? Here is my fork of smol, by the way: https://pastebin.com/imdWVrQ2 Edit: after reading my fork of smol, I realized it literally just feeds everything into bash, making it completely pointless. Edit 2: I decided to read the readme instead and it raised a qu…

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