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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#271

Post by BoiledCabbage »

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.

Power users don't want sandboxing and security??

You have a wildly different understanding of what a power user is...

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#272

Post by browningstreet »

I think banging on the "pi minimalism" thing is already old. Pi needs to have another dagger in its cachet. And frankly, I'm already tired of fighting Claude's lack of proper memory. So I guess I'm not-minimalism, but does that make me a maximalist?

I'm getting more development done with opencode, orca, and hermes. I do care about the harness though, as it extracts more juice from the rock model.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#273

Post by rcarmo »

whazor wrote: post #128
rcarmo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using both families of models inside pi/piclaw ( https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/ ) and I assure you they work _better_ in that environment than in the originals. The models are not trained to the harnesses, the harnesses provide cues that the models follow.

You can see the approach in his post: https://howaboua.dev/writing/how-i-gave-pi-17-tools-without-... The result: 38% fewer startup tokens, 17 tools exposed through just three schemas, and 19 skills loaded only when needed.

It's pretty much what I do as well, piclaw has had selective tool activation since... March, I think.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#274

Post by jbs789 »

alansaber wrote: post #178
jbs789 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It’s interesting. Many ways these things will be optimised. Just at the beginning !

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#275

Post by jmuguy »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #9
p1necone wrote: post #2

I love hacking away at pi extensions. I realised how use case dependent harness behaviour is when I tried to use my customised-for-a-side-project pi config at work and realised I needed to tweak it significantly to be useful - I would not be surprised if tools like Claude Code needing to be all things for all people is hurting their peak usefulness.

End up building Pi extensions instead of actual product. Doesn't make sense to me, but to each their own.

Yeah this seems pretty strange to me, I feel like I don't really care about messing around with all the tooling surrounding AI. I just want to get my actual work done. When I first moved to VS Code from Sublime Text I think I spent maybe 15 minutes setting up a few extensions like Emmet and then never really thought about it again - because I had actual work to do. I've just been waiting for all the constant change around AI coding to die down, assuming whatever is best will emerge and then I'll just use that.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#277

Post by catlover76 »

zahrevsky wrote: post #12
peterldowns wrote: post #5

We built our first version of our in-app agent with opencode, but we're probably going to switch to Pi. Fundamentally, Pi is the shape of the thing that should exist, and it's awesome to see that it works. Very satisfying to my engineering brain. Been having fun with ohmypi as my personal harness, but going to switch over to pi soon and just mess around with it until it works the way I want. The idea of completely pe…

Haven't heard of ohmypi, thanks! I feel like this is a good starting point for someone like me who is not ready to configure a harness from zero right now.

[dead]

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#278

Post by r_lee »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #247
throw10920 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion. Being reflexively contarian is not what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45530593 > For a program that's minimal it sure takes a long time to start up It took the same amount of time (3 seconds) as cursor-agent and codex on my machine, which isn't particularly high-spec. > the standard C-p and C-n bindings don't work It has p…

> Being contrarian for the sake of it is not good form. Why would you say that? Is it good form to post that someone is being contrarian for the sake of it? OP’s comment looks like constructive criticism with plenty of good points. > It took the same amount of time (3.5 seconds) as cursor-agent and codex on my machine. So what? Nobody is pretending that these are minimalist. Codex is 1.2M of Rust LOC. > which necessa…

I seriously don't get the hate for JS/TS. it's a lot more ergonomic than Lua.

just yesterday I saw someone claim they'd rather learn COBOL and use it than use JS

it's ridiculous imo.

the ram usage is one thing sure, but then it also means you can't use Claude Code because it also runs on top of JS.

so I guess we should all stop using Claude Code, right? cause it's "based on a shitty stack"

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#279

Post by throwuxiytayq »

r_lee wrote: post #278
throwuxiytayq wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being contrarian for the sake of it is not good form. Why would you say that? Is it good form to post that someone is being contrarian for the sake of it? OP’s comment looks like constructive criticism with plenty of good points. > It took the same amount of time (3.5 seconds) as cursor-agent and codex on my machine. So what? Nobody is pretending that these are minimalist. Codex is 1.2M of Rust LOC. > which necessa…

I seriously don't get the hate for JS/TS. it's a lot more ergonomic than Lua. just yesterday I saw someone claim they'd rather learn COBOL and use it than use JS it's ridiculous imo. the ram usage is one thing sure, but then it also means you can't use Claude Code because it also runs on top of JS. so I guess we should all stop using Claude Code, right? cause it's "based on a shitty stack"

Consider this:

- I regularly have 10+ instances of my harness running or idling on my laptop.

- My laptop is often at near-100% CPU and memory usage due to the (irreducible) cost of the development tools and environment.

- I often (50% of the time) downclock my laptop’s CPU to 1-2 GHz to save battery and/or reduce noise and thermals while charging.

- I sometimes run my harness on machines that are low-power, low-RAM single-board computers.

If my harness was written in JS, this would be both annoying in terms of responsiveness and limiting in terms of how much work I can do in parallel. This is why using JS for serious software is a... subpar decision.

> but then it also means you can't use Claude Code because it also runs on top of JS.

Correct. I don’t use Claude Code.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#280

Post by stephen_cagle »

intothemild wrote: post #132
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…

I might be misreading this, but I thought it was a reference to "Full Metal Jacket" => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoU2hlDJmFE ?

Ignoring the military stuff, I feel like it is saying that this harness, although stamped from a mass produced part, is mine once I take possession of it. An extension of me?

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