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I've sold out

mariozechner.at

131–140 of 201 posts

Re: I've sold out

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pi is a coding agent harness, like Claude Code, but significantly better and more elegant. Here is a good post describing it: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/ I switched a few months ago and have not looked back. Unfortunately Anthropic blocked access from Claude Subscription users today, but that's a different story.

I've been using oh-my-pi, for the simple (and possibly naive/stubborn) reason that it doesn't try to get me to install it as global npm dependency in /usr. I am not a web developer, I don't need npm and I don't want it clobbering my /usr (which is immutable on many modern distro's anyway). Doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the project to me. oh-my-pi's installer installs a bun bundled binary in my users .local fo…

pnpm installs to ~/.local as well

Re: I've sold out

#132
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any naming related to LotR in the tech industry is a glaring red flag, including this company.

It's called out in the post: > Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are basically well-meaning hippies in my book

That's how Sidney Gottlieb seemed in his retirement.

Re: I've sold out

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pi is a coding agent harness, like Claude Code, but significantly better and more elegant. Here is a good post describing it: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/ I switched a few months ago and have not looked back. Unfortunately Anthropic blocked access from Claude Subscription users today, but that's a different story.

I don't know much about the factors that determine why one AI coding harness is better than others. Is it system prompts? Or just personal preference in terms of the UX and there isn't actually a better output between using CC or Pi? So what makes Pi better than CC? Is it better than OpenCode?

My experience with harnesses is entirely about UX, personally. You could just use an LLM directly and pipe its output directly into your source files, but that would produce terrible results in practice. Harnesses / agents are just better versions of “curl https://llm.com > source.{py/js/cpp/etc}”, imo

Long term I’m bullish on an open source harness “winning” the foot race, in a similar way that Linux “won” over Windows and MacOS (that is, debatably)

Re: I've sold out

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pi is a coding agent harness, like Claude Code, but significantly better and more elegant. Here is a good post describing it: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/ I switched a few months ago and have not looked back. Unfortunately Anthropic blocked access from Claude Subscription users today, but that's a different story.

I've been using oh-my-pi, for the simple (and possibly naive/stubborn) reason that it doesn't try to get me to install it as global npm dependency in /usr. I am not a web developer, I don't need npm and I don't want it clobbering my /usr (which is immutable on many modern distro's anyway). Doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the project to me. oh-my-pi's installer installs a bun bundled binary in my users .local fo…

They're friendly for the user audience that doesn't care about these things. The location is a minor issue compared to many of the capabilities they come with. For the slightly more tech savvy, they should really be running these harnesses in a contained environment with net cap dropped, for instance.

Re: I've sold out

#139
post #98
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some people that are "way too deep" into what they think is the "AI ecosystem". The reality is that no such thing exists and most people opening Claude daily have never heard of their harness, tool, stack or whatever. It has about half the relevancy of "MCP", which is such a similar concept where hanger ons try to catch a steam train.

Wow, I couldn't disagree more! Claude Code is a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat. Pi has been elegantly designed with a minimalist mindset. > It has about half the relevancy of "MCP", which is such a similar concept where hanger ons try to catch a steam train. I'm not even sure what you're saying here. Are you saying MCP and Pi are similar concepts? Or that both are hanger-ons? I believe the steam train of Claude Co…

Pi does seem special, at least to me. The only close to happy experience I have had coding with a small local model has been with Pi. Here is how I ran Pi and I was impressed how well it worked with a 9B model:

OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=16384 ollama launch pi --model qwen3.5:9b

To get close to a happy experience with Claude Code or OpenCode with small local models I had to use 28B to 32B local models.

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