Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

earendil.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 307 posts

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#171

Post by Szpadel »

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 compaction does not compact whole context, but keeps last ~20k tokens as is, I believe this helps a lot to model to not get confused what it is doing right now.

it also have soft/soft compaction limit, it tries to compact on turn boundary when possible. with combining with above this can get you about 35% more context (at least it looks like this with the sol)

codex when shell command is executed, will pull output with hard cap at max 30s, so for running compilation it will burn tokens without any benefit.

I have some tasks where agent will have to run some suite that can take over an hour, and codex burns about $20/h just waiting and reasoning every 30s "yep, that's still running". And what is going to happen after compaction, when whole context was just waiting? it will loose the plot and when I'm back it just does completely different thing that I asked it to do.

codex also have a bug, that opening refuses to resolve that adds your last steer after compaction, so imagine that you asked it to cleanup some tmp files or refactor/simplify something. it will do that again and again after each compaction, best case it just burns tokens and figures out, this is already done, or worse do it again and mess up everything and forget about it's task

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#172

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…

> feeds everything into bash, making it completely pointless

here is a typical bench run with 9 runs and traces for opencode, pi and smol

you can look at every step and which tools are used and how

https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/

sh is pretty versatile and composes well

pi also only has 4 tools (good!)

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#173

Post by alansaber »

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?

It doesn't do anything unique WRT context management. It's just much less opinionated.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#174

Post by anonym29 »

Philpax wrote: post #165
mr_mitm wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#175

Post by imtringued »

tosh wrote: post #172
imtringued wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> feeds everything into bash, making it completely pointless here is a typical bench run with 9 runs and traces for opencode, pi and smol you can look at every step and which tools are used and how https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ sh is pretty versatile and composes well pi also only has 4 tools (good!)

I think I'm done with trying to tear this apart.

I mean, you can't be serious, right? Think about the unintentional commentary you're making here.

You're saying it can be understood in an afternoon but it is intentionally obfuscated.

It might as well be proprietary code, but if it is proprietary code, you're actually making fun of all the coding agents for being a walking security nightmare, because in the end all they do is run bash and no amount of sandboxing or regexes will make bash secure.

So why not drop the pretenses and just expose the coding harnesses for what they are? Inscrutable bash executors that have the potential to go out of control.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#176

Post by alansaber »

pmilanez wrote: post #153

Is there any good benchmarks for coding harness? In terms of tokens consumption, Pi is awesome..local model etc. But regarding coding quality, task completion, over engineering, all related to the final result that the LLM is delivering trough the harness, is there any benchmark that shows the ups and downs of each one? I'm struggling rotating harness because of a lack os a way to truly compared what is good or not.

Feels like a problem where you have to quantify/test for your own use-case. Otherwise just go by the generic SWE-bench scores etc.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#177

Post by alansaber »

thepasch wrote: post #125
thehours wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's hilarious

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#178

Post by alansaber »

jbs789 wrote: post #85
ironfootnz wrote: post #78

I think for indie hackers and people that build their own stack is great, but real scenario and people with money Enterprise likes the idea of batteries included. I found this one a little bit better and they do support Extensions like Pi. But comes with all features like codex, claude code and it's open-source. https://github.com/autohandai/code-cli

What it hints at is the direction of model agnostic and custom agents. I could see companies using Pi to create a product for orgs, for example. Low cost and closer to the customer needs than a general harness.

This is the new enterprise trend (RAG? no, we need our own pi plugin/adaptation).

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#179

Post by tosh »

imtringued wrote: post #175
tosh wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> feeds everything into bash, making it completely pointless here is a typical bench run with 9 runs and traces for opencode, pi and smol you can look at every step and which tools are used and how https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ sh is pretty versatile and composes well pi also only has 4 tools (good!)

I think I'm done with trying to tear this apart. I mean, you can't be serious, right? Think about the unintentional commentary you're making here. You're saying it can be understood in an afternoon but it is intentionally obfuscated. It might as well be proprietary code, but if it is proprietary code, you're actually making fun of all the coding agents for being a walking security nightmare, because in the end all th…

your favorite agent will help you de-golf and analyze the implementation

I'm confident you can understand what it does (and does not do) and why in an afternoon

(probably in 20-30 minutes actually, even if you are not familiar with Go)

the same is way more difficult with larger agent implementations even if you only want to understand the direct implementation ignoring all the 3rd party dependencies that come with them

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#180

Post by hn8726 »

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'll take any scripting language over Lua any day. Every time I had to extend a tool that used Lua as a scripting language, I abandoned that tool because Lua was such a pain. I genuinely don't understand the praise it gets
Post reply on HN