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

251–260 of 307 posts

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#251

Post by timwis »

veber-alex wrote: post #129
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 fork a conversation in Claude as well.

Only at the current point in the conversation though, right? You can't rewind and then fork from a previous message, as far as I know

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#254

Post by WinstonSmith84 »

alasano wrote: post #33
pornel wrote: post #18

I'm enjoying the maximal version: https://omp.sh

I find omp funny because it's the opposite of why Iike Pi.

it depends on how you see things. By default OMP with all its options turned off is very much like Pi, just with a better UX/UI - and - a faster start, somehow. And you can turn things on when needed. I see people like Pi because it's super skinny and they can tweak it with extensions A, B or C. I like OMP because I don't have to spend time figuring out the next best thing while there is a guy out there who knows (more than me) what he is doing and packaging all the good stuff into his app. Yes it's opinionated, but I use regularly half of the installed extensions - and occasionally play with other features too.

But I can agree on a thing: the best for OMP would be to have a clear "list of extensions" that can be activated or deactivated (to unclutter the menus)

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#255

Post by jsw97 »

A fundamental limitation of third-party harnesses is that they can't see all the data. As earendil pointed out, providers are now moving to encrypted thinking blocks.

As an example, this could affect compaction. If pi calls another agent to do the compacting, that agent can't read the encrypted thinking blocks. In contrast, if codex calls another openai-codex agent to do the compaction, they can feed that agent the thinking blocks. In theory, this additional information could be useful to the compacting agent. In practice, I don't think it helps too much right now. But I could see ways for providers to exploit this to drive a bigger wedge between their harnesses and pi.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#256

Post by bakugo »

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…

Here's some annoyances of my own that honestly baffle me:

- The command to exit the program is /quit, not /exit like literally everything else. If you type /exit, it'll get sent as a message to the AI. Apparently, /exit was an alias of /quit at some point, but was removed because it was simply too intuitive.

- It has terminal subcommands, such as `pi install` to install an extension. Any reasonable person would expect that `pi help` would give you a list of such commands. Nope! That actually starts it up and sends the message "help" to the AI. Amazing.

It's a common theme that most AI-generated or AI-adjacent software is full of nonsensical little decisions like this, that almost make it feel like it's not intended to be used by sane humans.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#257

Post by nasduia »

gwerbin wrote: post #234
oblio wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platform standards already require things to be in different locations compared to *NIX dotfiles and dotdirectories - for example Windows %APPDATA%. I find it a bit shocking that someone working on an agent harness can't be bothered to spend 5 minutes to research this with the help of an LLM and holds such rigid and uninformed views. And if you don't want to respect platform standards, just respect XDG on all platfor…

I suspect some people are out there who actually like the single directory style. Obviously it's easier for the software developer, but I suspect some users like it too because everything's all in one place. It's very likely that Mario is one of those people.

it's certainly easier to keep a single directory under version control and share between Linux and macOS

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#258

Post by buckle8017 »

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…

You gave an agent access to your really home directory?

lol

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#259

Post by talloaktrees »

mft_ wrote: post #214
v3gas wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is that set of functions for you?

I can't offer a definitive list. But some/all of web access, web search, sub-agents, plan, goals, looping, and maybe a to-do list. I'd suggest the default should be anything that makes the model more efficient or effective to a reasonable current level.

the thing is about some of these things, like sub-agents, is that any implementation of sub-agents is going to be extremely opinionated, so it would never make sense to be in pi out of the box.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#260

Post by maleldil »

olowe wrote: post #231
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

Not sure about use in the Go community at large but Go introduced os.UserConfigDir[1] which is portable across Windows, macOS, Plan 9 and Linux/BSD as per XDG back in 2019. Also CacheDir. [1]: https://pkg.go.dev/os#UserConfigDir

> On Darwin, it returns $HOME/Library/Application Support

Which is not the behaviour most people would think is sensible, especially for CLI programs.

Post reply on HN