Love pi. It's good to have a minimal agent, always welcome. Even if only to bootstrap install other agents. E.g. recently Hermes stopped installing under Termux (v0.19 - no, v0.18 - yes). Agent pi to the rescue: installed it under Termux (Android), started it, pointed pi to the Hermes github, asked for v0.18 specifically - and it did it. Cherry on the top - asked it to install a plugin from github I use (unmerged PR), did that too. Even if nowadays for coding I mostly use OMP (the pi with wheels and bells and whistles). For general computer use mostly use Hermes. Model-tied harnesses have their place e.g. Codex for me. I never know if it's allowed or banned using the sub from non-Codex harness - so stick with it. Even if only to have the 'canonical reference setup' to compare with and measure against.
Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
191–200 of 308 posts
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#192I've had a lot of success running Pi on my server in headless mode and wrapping it in an XMPP client. This means I can talk to it wherever I can access XMPP (everywhere). It also mean agents can talk to each other when they need to. They've got a shared wiki they interact with and github issues as their todo list. I am running several named pi instances in parallel in their own user account on NixOS, so they can inst…
at this point, what's the advantage of this setup vs something like hermes?
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#193i also found re context window: less is more at least with GPT 5.6 Sol fwiw https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ sh is all you need
Can file edits be erroneous?
yes but GPT 5.6 Sol is pretty good at editing files via sh (e.g. using python)
I also see codex do it that way quite often
and at the same time Opus struggles with using the edit tool in Claude Code even though model and harness are by the same company
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#194Lots 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…
> 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 directory. This drives me mad, I believe Ollama and Claude Code also do this. Seems to be rife in the LLM world. IMO there's no excuse for new software sticking dotfiles in my homedir in 2026.
i raised a bug for this on the pi repo. it was immediately triaged into `wont do`.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#195Lots 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 don't get the XDG appeal of having all the data of an app scattered all over the home dir when I can just have a .dir of an app with everything inside.
Backups. If a program properly follows the spec I can just `rsync ~/.config/foo` or store it in a repo and not have to worry about it. If a program doesn't follow the spec I now have to write program specific filters for rsync/custom .gitignore entries to avoid backing up state and cache. Now multiply that across dozens of programs written by lazy devs who don't want to write 12 lines of code to determine the correct location for their files.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#196Lots 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…
> 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 directory. This drives me mad, I believe Ollama and Claude Code also do this. Seems to be rife in the LLM world. IMO there's no excuse for new software sticking dotfiles in my homedir in 2026.
The problem with the XDG spec is that it now forces you to have different paths on different platforms. It just increases the complexity and at the end of the day unless all software adheres to it, you still end up with a “polluted HOME”.
I’m not a fan of config directories being in different locations on different platforms because it’s now one extra thing everyone needs to handle.
(Disclaimer: I work on Pi but I dislike XDG in all settings)
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#197Lots 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 don’t know what the standard C-p and C-n bindings are. Could you share?
The startup time is a known issue and scales badly with extensions. We’re aware of it but fixing it is tricky.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 directory. This drives me mad, I believe Ollama and Claude Code also do this. Seems to be rife in the LLM world. IMO there's no excuse for new software sticking dotfiles in my homedir in 2026.
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
Go isn't perfect, but $GOPATH isn't really used that much anymore. There's a bunch of stuff in ~/.config/ and ~/.cache/
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#199Earlier 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
Go isn't perfect, but $GOPATH isn't really used that much anymore. There's a bunch of stuff in ~/.config/ and ~/.cache/
Go creates `~/go` by default. It's not even hidden. Unfortunately, saying it's not really used that much doesn't help with this.
Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
#200We’ve been building atop the .agents standard and have written some tools around this under the ai-outfitter org few interesting repos.
- outfitter compose different agent profile w, eg skills, mcp, context and wrap pi,Claude,codex - agent-operator run these agents into kubernetes - actions run pi during investigations on failed ci or weekly updates - channels give pi agents an inbox for slack/email/websocket access, calendar wake ups - deepwork build long running workflows with verification gates
The best example of different profiles is having a prod/nonprod bot that has grafana mcp for incident investigation