As somebody who considered building with Pi, I think I like this. I can imagine some good coming out of this for the ecosystem.
And if they mess it up, it’ll be easy enough to fork.
I've sold out
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Re: I've sold out
#72I read most of the post, went to the linked project and still don't have an idea what this is about.
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 switched about a month ago, looked back once for about 10 minutes and decided I'm officially done w CC. I didn't realize what a dull knife CC is until I tried a really sharp one, and that's Pi.
Re: I've sold out
#73Re: I've sold out
#74[dead]
Re: I've sold out
#75What the hell is going on with all these weird tech bros naming their companies after Tolkein mythos?
Re: I've sold out
#76In light of all the stuff about Thiel and friends, I'd really stay away from Tolkien/Middle-Earth themed startup names for now...
Any naming related to LotR in the tech industry is a glaring red flag, including this company.
Re: I've sold out
#77Context: Mario Zechner is the creator of the pi coding harness which powers OpenClaw. OpenClaw is made by Peter Steinberger, a friend of Mario Zechner. Armin is another friend who made public that OpenClaw is based on pi.
Pi itself is a minimalist coding harness with a tiny 1500 token system message and only read, edit and bash as tools. I only discovered it a few weeks ago and it is surprisingly powerful with a local Qwen3.5-35B - especially as it allows to keep the context low.
Mario's blog posts are not easily digestible (imho) until you have read a few of them but they have plenty of profound thinking. His blog is for me the first one in years where I have spent an hour to read several posts.
Mario is deeply rooted in the OSS system and basically that is what he is talking about here in this post. That said, I have no idea what earendil is doing, except that it is based on pi.
Edit: My personal take - "I've sold out" is very much Austrian style because actually it is the opposite. To quote one thing from the post:
"Then Miguel and Nat approached us. Long story short: we sold RoboVM to Xamarin. A short while later Xamarin closed-sourced our open-source RoboVM core, quickly followed by Xamarin selling to Microsoft. Then Microsoft shut down RoboVM immediately.
While there was some monetary gain, everything about this fucking sucked."
So Mario did a lot of vetting to hopefully avoid this from happening again.
Re: I've sold out
#78Piloting OSS is all the work of any other business and more. It is a more challenging path and all your decisions are out in the open for scrutiny. He made a decision to put his family first, and I respect that. It seems like there is an alternative to selling out, trusting the project to other people committed to OSS. The beauty of OSS is that this path is still available for people.
Re: I've sold out
#79I guess Earendil sounds a lot like Anduril - had to check and now I understand they are not defense contractors!
I had to check as well. Their logos are also similar.
Re: I've sold out
#80I think it's a bit sad that we often say people "Sold out". Sometimes, I agree, but often, I point out that until the lady at the grocery store stops asking me for money when I walk up to check out, I need to pay my bills to eat.
I contribute to open source projects, but none of them to date could support me buying much more than a beer. If one took off such that I could "live" off it, I would be happy to leave my current job and dive all in. Until then, I just keep plodding along.