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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

earendil.com

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Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#261

Post by maleldil »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #205
alt219 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C-p and C-n (aka Ctrl-P and Ctrl-N) are the Emacs-style keybindings for previous (line) and next (line), very commonly encountered on the command line and in terminal applications. For example, most shells can use this in addition to up-arrow and down-arrow to cycle thru command history. Many, many more examples exist of applications (not just terminal-based, there are plenty of GUI apps too) that use this convention…

Ctrl+P in most coding agents is bound to bringing up a command bar. You should be able to bind both hotkeys to the functionality you want already.

That's wrong. Both Claude Code and Codex have C-p/C-n as down/up.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#262

Post by WithinReason »

throw10920 wrote: post #239
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…

> 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

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#263

Post by frantathefranta »

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.

Ghostty has chosen to use that as the default and I feel like it's going to be the tipping point where people will assume $HOME/Library/Application Support is normal for CLI programs.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#264

Post by la_fayette »

imtringued wrote: post #124
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.

Correct. pi.dev is not a minimal coding agent. It already comes with crazy amounts of preconceptions baked in. For example, it comes with a bash tool built that you cannot disable. This is not minimal, it's the full kitchen sink. If I want to build a custom agent I have to literally stop using pi.dev and switch to something else. So yeah, I fully disagree with the title. "Pi’s Minimalism Is Its Advantage" No. full st…

you can just use the --tools flag to disable bash tool

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#265

Post by bamischijf »

rsyring wrote: post #249
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…

Pi but in Rust: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust

One look at that project and I'm already losing my mind

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#266

Post by monkeydust »

I do think that the value of these harnesses is inverse to the abilities of the frontier models - meaning - that as the models get smarter (by whatever benchmark you want to use) the harness matters less - it becomes more around context i.e. data.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#267

Post by oblio »

throw10920 wrote: post #239
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…

> 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…

> It took the same amount of time (3 seconds) as cursor-agent and codex on my machine, which isn't particularly high-spec.

A simple CLI tool should start instantly and lazily load anything that can't be loaded instantly.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#269

Post by sunaookami »

senko wrote: post #167

Meta: this reads like a corporate article, info-selling a solution to enterprises. The style is a far cry from anything Mario or Armin usually write. First indication of business strategy around Pi's reverse acquisition of Earendil, perhaps?

The first indication was them adding telemetry to Pi right after the acquisition.

Re: Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

#270

Post by toephu2 »

archargelod wrote: post #209

Sorry for negativity, but it wouldn't hurt to put some qualifier in the title, like, "Pi agent". So people, not interested in that theme can avoid your article. Thank you. I was expecting an article about Pi constant or maybe raspberry Pi computer. "My Disappointment Is Immeasurable And My Day Is Ruined!"

When I first heard about pi.dev I was also initially confused. Raspberry Pi is already very big in the hacker community... they really should not have named this harness "Pi".
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