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

281–290 of 307 posts

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#281

Post by troyvit »

jsw97 wrote: post #255

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 t…

This is interesting because of just how old-school SaaS it is. They're using old modes to build a wider moat around their product, hoping that it will keep their customers within it.

The AI boom feels different from the SaaS boom though because of all the different flavors of open that are available to people right now, from self-hosting your own stuff if you're a rich tinkerer to hooking up to OpenRouter or another service and getting your pick of models. I feel like some of the biggest providers are going to find themselves on the wrong side of the moat because, despite being massive innovators in their field they're monetizing it like they did in 2014.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#282

Post by oblio »

nasduia wrote: post #257
gwerbin wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As in, $HOME? Version controlling it needs to be done very carefully.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#283

Post by gcr »

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.

why can’t it be undone?

for new installations going forward, why not put the folder in XDG_CONFIG_DIR and an optional symlink from ~/.cargo that can be opted in

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#284

Post by gcr »

maleldil wrote: post #260
olowe wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mac users are used to checking ~/Library/Application Support/App, ~/.app, and ~/.local/config/app

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#285

Post by zdp7 »

stephen_cagle wrote: post #280
intothemild wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My read sees pi as a starter kit. It's job is to build personal workflows and not to dictate a workflow. Copy on the site calls it minimal and tells us to 'adapt pi to your workflow, not the other way around.' In other words a fleshed out pi is unique to you.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#286

Post by jonaustin »

maleldil wrote: post #260
olowe wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

fwiw, it absolutely drives me nuts that cli programs are putting configs in that hard to reach folder (long path name and _spaces_ in the folder name ugh)

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#287

Post by r_lee »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #279
r_lee wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's fair. I think with a lot of these harnesses they didn't really think people would be running so many instances of them at once

I think for claude code it really would be best if they made it native, but for plugins I think JS wins, because it's just a lot more easier for most to write plugins in that.

from my POV the performance used to be bad but it's pretty good now, every now and then though it'll start just growing in memory usage and needs to be restarted every now and then. so if you'd 10x that then I could see it really limiting workflows, especially with SBCs

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#288

Post by mraza007 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #229
mraza007 wrote: post #84

Pi Agent has been one of my favorite harness when it comes to using with local models I had a lot of success running it on my Mac with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model

Same experience, sometimes using Little Coder helps make things faster because it is built on pi and strips out some functionality. Probably best to stick with pi however, adding pi-sandbox for some security. I will only run Little Coder in an Apple Container.

Haven’t heard about little corer but I’ll give it a try

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#289

Post by Onavo »

pavo-etc wrote: post #19
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.

The secret here is giving pi its own user account on your machine, using Unix permissions.

It doesn't do auto approval.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#290

Post by colinmarc »

colinmarc wrote: post #107
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?

I use my Anthropic subscription with Pi. I thought they would start charging me API usage at some point, but it never happened. (If it did happen, I would switch to open weights models.)

...funnily enough, a few hours after posting this, it stopped working.
Post reply on HN