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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#291

Post by 4chandaily »

pavo-etc wrote: post #29
zrail wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you use the pi-xmpp[1] extension or do you have your own? [1]: https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp

Initially I was using that extension but I ran into its limitations pretty quickly. Sometimes the agent wouldn't reply over XMPP, it didn't have any support for typing indicators or status messages, and it had no way to support inter-agent communication, the agent could only ever speak to the configured owner account. I also had no way of running system commands like /new over XMPP. The headless pi + xmpp wrapper end…

Thanks for sharing this! It is so much smoother than the vibe coded monstrosity I had been using.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#292

Post by josh_p »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #271
josh_p wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Or you could do any of the things they suggest in their documentation: https://pi.dev/docs/latest/security#running-untrusted-or-unm...

It's not like there isn't competition in this space.

Like I said, it's okay if you need those things. Pi might not be for your use-case and that's okay, too.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#293

Post by throw10920 »

WithinReason wrote: post #262
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…

This is an incredibly reflexively contrarian comment

This is factually false.

A contrarian is "A person who likes or tends to express a contradicting viewpoint, especially from one held by a majority of people, usually because of nonconformity or spite."

The post I replied to is literally being contrarian:

> Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion.

Meanwhile, my post was not being contrarian in the slightest. I didn't offer a contradictory viewpoint - I provided factual information and context to dispel false claims/misinformation in the post I was responding to (e.g. the claim "the standard C-p and C-n bindings don't work" is highly misleading/false because you can trivially rebind them), and the opinions I provided were completely orthogonal to the opinion expressed ("I suspect that if the harness was written in Lua [...] you would have far more issues with it."

I expressed no opinion either for or against "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."

It always surprises me when someone so confidently makes an objectively incorrect statement when they could have spent 30 seconds looking up the definition of a word and realized that they were in the wrong.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/contrarian

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/contrari...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contrarian

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#294

Post by throw10920 »

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…

>> Being contrarian for the sake of it is not good form.

> Why would you say that?

Because it's true.

> Is it good form to post that someone is being contrarian for the sake of it?

It's orthogonal to good form - it's preserving the value of HN, which is meant for intellectual curiosity and not knee-jerk emotional reactions, like your comment.

> OP’s comment looks like constructive criticism with plenty of good points.

You must have missed the very first line in their comment where they said:

> Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion.

...which is literally admitting to being reflexively contrarian.

Additionally, their criticisms were extremely shallow and/or misleading, and I addressed every one.

> So what?

Nobody is inconvenienced by a 3.5s startup time of an application meant to run for hours or days. That's a trivial complaint akin to arguing about the color of paint on a bikeshed.

> Don’t be silly, JS is a joke. I was going to check Pi out, but now that I know it’s based on a shitty stack, I’m staying the fuck away from it. I don’t have the RAM to spare.

You're just operating based on emotion and not a state of reason or intellectual curiosity. And I highly doubt that you "were going to check Pi out" - this wording follows the pattern of fabricating falsehoods out rage due to an opinion expressed that you didn't like.

>> If these are your complaints, then this is one of the strongest endorsements of Pi that I've ever seen. I think I'm bookmarking this comment.

>> good form

Did you forget to make a point here?

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#295

Post by throw10920 »

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…

The claims being made here are fallacious in three extremely basic ways.

First, "I regularly have 10+ instances of my harness running or idling on my laptop" implicitly asserts that you need that many instances running at once.

You don't. You can have a single instance running that handles your sessions in parallel.

Second, "I sometimes run my harness on machines that are low-power, low-RAM single-board computers." presumes the whole agent has to run on the SBC itself. It doesn't. There are agents (including Pi, which makes this even sillier) that can run their tool calls in a separate process/host, meaning that the agent can live on your development machine while the tiny tool-call daemon runs on the SBC.

Finally, "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." could only be written out of a complete lack of understanding about how harnesses are actually implemented.

Agent harnesses don't do very much. The limiting factor is not the harness itself, but in the filesystem (reads, writes, file searches, greps), the computational tool calls (compilers, linters, evaluating the program), and the LLM API itself.

Your arguments against Javascript appear to be based on fallacies, lack of understanding of technology, and strong emotions against JS rather than actual fact.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#296

Post by cultofmetatron »

hakunin wrote: post #74
throw10920 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are subagents basic? I found them only useful in very few situations. I've found them to be extraordinarily helpful, because they allow me to much more carefully control context and reduce token spend by using a smart model for the parent agent and cheap models for the subagents. Do you just have a big token budget?

I started out using OpenCode with subagents. Then, after switching to Pi, went completely subagentless, usually on the current frontier GPT model. I didn't notice any significant change in context usage, and tasks were completed faster. That surprised me, I'm still not sure (not an expert on this), but maybe the handoff boundary was the problem. When the main model gives an isolated task to the subagent, the latter g…

I found the new deepseek flash is so good I rarely have to pull out gpt sol anymore. if anything for coding tasks, gpt sol ends to go out of scope and I have to reign it in. Trying to keep my tasks managably small for human review is a endless battle with the frontier models.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#297

Post by throwuxiytayq »

throw10920 wrote: post #295
throwuxiytayq wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The claims being made here are fallacious in three extremely basic ways. First, "I regularly have 10+ instances of my harness running or idling on my laptop" implicitly asserts that you need that many instances running at once. You don't. You can have a single instance running that handles your sessions in parallel. Second, "I sometimes run my harness on machines that are low-power, low-RAM single-board computers." p…

This is getting silly, I can’t tell whether you are kidding, never launched a Node-based app, or never checked htop.

> that can run their tool calls in a separate process/host

That indeed seems like a simple and elegant setup. I can’t recall a single instance of using a harness when I didn’t want the tool calls to be local, though. Why would I be SSHing into a SBC just to run the agent back on my laptop?

> You can have a single instance running that handles your sessions in parallel.

Sounds even more elegant! Presumably, they communicate via HTTP?

> implicitly asserts that you need that many instances running at once.

I don’t need to, but I can. That’s the entire point, in case you’re still missing it.

> Your arguments against Javascript appear to be based on fallacies, lack of understanding of technology, and strong emotions against JS rather than actual fact.

How beautifully ironic.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#298

Post by throwuxiytayq »

throw10920 wrote: post #294
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…

>> Being contrarian for the sake of it is not good form. > Why would you say that? Because it's true. > Is it good form to post that someone is being contrarian for the sake of it? It's orthogonal to good form - it's preserving the value of HN, which is meant for intellectual curiosity and not knee-jerk emotional reactions, like your comment. > OP’s comment looks like constructive criticism with plenty of good points…

> Nobody is inconvenienced by a 3.5s startup time of an application meant to run for hours or days.

For the record, I measure acceptable latency in milliseconds. I think it has something to do with my brain.

> which is literally admitting to being reflexively contrarian.

They’re very clearly stating that they’re expressing their opinion because it is underrepresented.

> Did you forget to make a point here?

No.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#299

Post by kriro »

badlogic wrote: post #204
kriro wrote: post #134

Philosophically, pi.dev is exactly what I'm looking for. Minimalist and explicit (YOLO by default, we know it can be trouble but we tell you so). Anyone here using the Rust rewrite of pi.dev as their daily driver? It's endorsed by the author of pi.dev and looks pretty attractive to me being both minimalist and not having npm attached. Any info "from the trenches" are appreciated (setup with sandboxing, extra niceties…

i don't remember endorsing any rust rewrite of pi.

Ok, I'm a dummy: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust

"pi_agent_rust is a from-scratch Rust port of Pi Agent by Mario Zechner (made with his blessing!)."

It's pi, not pi.dev

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#300

Post by throw10920 »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #298
throw10920 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Being contrarian for the sake of it is not good form. > Why would you say that? Because it's true. > Is it good form to post that someone is being contrarian for the sake of it? It's orthogonal to good form - it's preserving the value of HN, which is meant for intellectual curiosity and not knee-jerk emotional reactions, like your comment. > OP’s comment looks like constructive criticism with plenty of good points…

> Nobody is inconvenienced by a 3.5s startup time of an application meant to run for hours or days. For the record, I measure acceptable latency in milliseconds. I think it has something to do with my brain. > which is literally admitting to being reflexively contrarian. They’re very clearly stating that they’re expressing their opinion because it is underrepresented. > Did you forget to make a point here? No.

> For the record, I measure acceptable latency in milliseconds. I think it has something to do with my brain.

That's a personal preference thing. You're not really being inconvenienced.

> They’re very clearly stating that they’re expressing their opinion because it is underrepresented.

That's literally the dictionary definition of being contrarian:

"A person who likes or tends to express a contradicting viewpoint, especially from one held by a majority of people, usually because of nonconformity or spite."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/contrarian

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/contrari...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contrarian

I suggest consulting the dictionary before using terms you're not familiar with.

> No.

If you're going to copy-paste random pieces of text without making a point, you probably shouldn't be on HN. HN is for intellectual curiosity and debate, not Reddit-esque expressions of randomness conflated wuth humor.

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