I’m also looking for tips. I feel like I get the gist, but if I sat down to use it, I don’t know what I want to start with. Like, I know it’s customizable, but what’s the on-ramp so I can figure out what that looks like?
So Pi is a lot of fun. I’ve been working on Volt, a fork of Pi, mostly out of my frustrations with remote development. I expanded out the existing RPC and built a mobile app around it.
It kind of just gets with how you creative you want to be about it.
You use it, then something bugs you, then you find an extension that solves the problem, or tell an agent to fix it for you by making your own extension.
It's kinda a tinkerer hobby IMO. I like the freedom, but at the end of the day, it's still just a harness.
I run it with a single extension to give it web search access, and then I have a few skills for reviewing and planning. You really don't need that much IMO
If you can't find a use for it, then don't use it. So easy. 99% of AI related things are mostly hype and totally useless. Adult childrin having their shiny new gadgets make them feel 14 year old again and again.
Oh My Pi comes preloaded with most stuff you need, so there's not much need to add extensions. <a href="https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi
IndyDevDan videos are great for learning the basics <a href="https://youtu.be/f8cfH5XX-XU?si=gm-trlU7RTG4wVjJ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/f8cfH5XX-XU?si=gm-trlU7RTG4wVjJ
It works ok and good by default. You start using it as if you'd Claude or Codex, the when you find yourself missing a feature, you get an extension for it or you ask an agent to make it.
For example, I started using it, wanted a plan mode, downloaded an extension for it. Wanted to be able to analyze token usage for turn in a session, I had an agent create an extension for that. Then I wanted a custom status bar, so I had an agent implement an extension for that.
And you're probably more productive than the people using Pi. Although you'd be even better off using a GUI agent multiplexer of some kind rather than juggling terminal tabs.
I love open source. I love the terminal. I spent the last 20+ years in a terminal w/vim every single day, and then claude/codex TUIs, and yet I care more about my own productivity so I don't use any of that now.
Personally I use gh copilot in vscode and make new worktrees when I want parallel agents that are both going to write code.
For research, planning, figuring out bugs, etc I usually don’t bother creating the worktree until I’ve decided on the implementation.
I’m sure there’s better workflows and software, but all I’ve got for work is gh copilot and Claude enterprise. I like copilot better than Claude for the most part.
onorca.dev. I used herdr before now Orca has fully replaced it. (I'm not affilianted with Orca in any way except I use it every day).
Orca also supports separate hosts.
My setup
Orca running in my Mac. Orca running in my home proxmox lxc (orcabox).
I have few different projects, Rails, PHP, etc. In Orca, I open these projects and point it to my local folder as well as the folder remotely.
I usually start a codex or claude session on the remote host, close my mac, even restart Orca desktop on mac, but when I start Orca, I can watch the Orca on my remote host working through.
It's similar to Claude remote session, but just easier to manage, easier to create worktree, easier to navigate, open multiple tabs etc.
you can just roll your own, this is probably the most popular side project of the past year, I crafted my own version within a day or so this past week, with corny visual assets as well since its just for me. Kinda rolled my workflows into it so it fits how i work with plans and how i avoid compaction in favor of handoffs or just plan docs that constrain each session to x amount of tokens each session.
Tossed all my weekly usage for each provider at the top with their 5hour windows and such. its been great so far.
Yeah I also created my own TUI one and only took a couple days. Using it less now though because the models have gotten pretty good at spinning up their own agents.
The important thing is just to a GUI agent multiplexer, they're all mostly doing the same kind of thing. IMHO it's very important to have the official claude and codex harnesses (not just models). I also like having each session in a isolated container (or VM) so the agent can go wild and run in yolo mode.
I usually recommend Conductor to most people. Personally, I use the one I built, but it's got a few ergonomic issues for most people which I still need to fix.
Paseo allows you to start a daemon from command line, thereby passing your ENV credentials to the daemon from, say, your 1Password-based env. Then both local Mac GUI and their native iPhone app (through Tailscale) can connect to this daemon. This is the most ergonomic local and remote setup where I can start a session on my Mac and continue on my phone or vice versa, with any agent: Pi, Claude, Codex, OMP, all natively supported.
No affiliation, just arrived at Paseo after a bunch of research.
I've eventually settled on a CLI agent multiplexer that essentially run in the background while the frontend is a GUI gateway agent to that backend system with a goal middle layer so I no longer need to interject directly into the prompts and forces the CC and Codexes to communicate to me in a structured format relevant to my purpose.
If you like the terminal I'm building <a href="https://alcubi.ai/delegator/" rel="nofollow">https://alcubi.ai/delegator/ It's terminal based and I've taken a different approach to avoid context overload of switching tabs. Agents run in the background and you review the work when it's ready.
There's something about this take that... irks me. A little bit more every time I hear it, and I've been hearing it a lot. I dislike the implication that anyone who takes more care with their setup than downloading an exe from a website and double clicking it is some kind of chump. They could be prompting the next ticket instead!
Even if taking pride in your tools was a productivity killer (I have my doubts), maybe there's mental value to be gained.
You're inferring things I did not actually imply.
In Oct 2026, if you're optimizing for productivity, then yes, you probably should just use both Claude and Codex in a GUI agent multiplexer and forget about everything else.
If you care about other things, then have fun, no one is stopping you. I'd disagree with you that using alternatives mean you take more "care" and have more "pride" in your tools, but it's hardly worth arguing over.
It's not an either/or. Orca is a GUI agent multiplexer that works with dozens of harnesses, including Pi. The advantage with Pi is that you can vibe code any kind of extension you want. I like to see various stats (tps, ttft, etc) on each turn, and there's an extension for that, but it doesn't show wall clock time for the turn. Ok, pull down the extension and tweak it to add that. It's great.
I believe this is the popular "batteries included" kit: <a href="https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi
I know that's the way omp is often introduced but I don't think it's fair for either omp or pi - after lately switching my usage more towards omp I'd say by this point they're almost more different than Pi and Codex. And I like them both.
Yeah I just gave it a run and it starts off burning 6% of my tokens on start.
Pi sits at 0%.
I'm so use to the command keys in Pi that having to type something out in OMP slows me down. I'll stick with Pi, I've built it to my needs and having WSL finally working. I still have to run 2 CLIs, one for LLama.ccp and the other for Pi, not sure if this is normal.
OMP provides a significant amount of structure to the work. That costs some tokens in terms of the system prompt. When I use these systems, I balance the return of the extra guidance in the system prompt with the cost of the context. You've talked about how much context it takes, but you haven't talked about any difference in behavior.
omp offers some nice tools, like /shake, to manage context efficiently and offset some of that consumption.
Not sure about your point with command keys. OMP has all kinds of shortcuts and is highly configurable. It seems very unlikely that you cannot achieve what you're looking for in OMP in terms of shortcuts. Specifics would be immensely helpful here.
And yeah, you'll need to run your inference engine separately from your harness, for the same reason the web server and the web browser are different applications.
That the "batteries included" bit, but it's not "burning tokens" in the sense that using Pi with the same batteries would (of course) use just as many. I can strongly recommend omp.sh if you just want to be up and running without hassle and a far better (for me) developer experience.
Yeah, saying it kills the minimalist bit misses the point of omp being a separate project. It took a minimalist-base of pi and added tools that make it usable out of the box. Hence batteries.
One example here is that it added MCP extensions to make the harness usable with MCP servers long before Pi figured out that that was the right move. A lot can be said about development of MCP over that timeframe, but I appreciated the bias towards adoption, since progress is driven by empirical experimentation rather than theory in this domain right now.
I've long championed assembling developer tools yourself from scratch and I've been an advocate of vanilla Emacs and customizing it yourself as an ideal developer experience (I realize this opinion is controversial). But OMP is essentially the VSCode to pi's Emacs.
I ended up choosing omp as my daily driver, mostly because I see the velocity of change in AI development being far too fast for me to make a worthwhile investment into customizing the environment myself, since that investment will have a relatively short half-life. With Linux, which I learned more than 30 years ago and still believe to be a fantastic investment, I can largely use the same knowledge I gained then to administer systems today. I fear that much investment in the specific tools that I add to my pi harness will expire before 2027. So I'm sort of drafting OMP until things settle down.
I am wondering what use people get out of this. What I like about pi is that, using proprietary harnesses to begin with, I already somewhat know what kind of features I use and features I wish I could use. Asking pi to self modify itself (with a smart enough model) is a one time cost for a fully vetted feature that I personally approve. Do users of OMP find all of its additions useful?
Yeah, Advisor and "time-travelling rules" (TTSR) work great (they're injecting corrective prompts automatically either via another critic LLM or a bunch of regex rules, respectively)
It automates a lot of the babysitting of agents, and lets me use a couple of smaller models with safeguards instead of burning tokens on a galaxy brain just because it listens to instructions in AGENTS.md.
It’s the same kind of people that would use omz, they probably have no idea what 90% of the batteries are or do. But it sure makes them feel smart and cool.
It's been pretty useful for experimenting with local models due to its more light-weight approach. Though I respect the creators a ton, OpenCode has not seemed to work as well with models that run on consumer hardware
qwen3.5 4b and 9b have both been surprisingly good for small tasks. a pattern I've been using is orchestrating pi agents with a script (that you can write using a frontier model) for common tasks. one script i use a lot is organizing photos from my photography shoots.
What does a "script" mean in this context? Like a Python script that runs a series of agents with small tasks? I'm still getting used to doing things with AI, this is all very new to me.
I have more beefcake machines and Qwen 4.6 36B has been awesome for coding. Its fast for a local model, seems to get a lot right most of the time, just its slower than OpenAI/Claude/Cloud Hosted stuff since I dont have a 24GB+ GPU (I have Strix Halo and a 12GB GPU)
> Here I am with Claude Code and Codex in a terminal like a caveman
There's definitely a class of folks who like to "polish their tools" per se vs tools just being as a means to an end.
It's fine and cool, sort of like the desktop ricers do with Hyperland, Niri, etc showing off desktops, but never seem to do anything with this cool tech.
Vanilla Pi is great. I have a subagent/ Ralph loop extension I coded and that's basically it. It works very well. I'm about 75% pi, 20% autolith, and 5% my own harness
I use claude code and codex in a terminal like a caveman too.
then i use pi in a terminal like a caveman to try the open models like deepseek etc.
I also have pi running on a VPS. I have a custom Django app that calls out to it for a bunch of stuff. I don't know how the full system works because the agents built it but basically I think one pi uses a whatsapp wrapper to constantly listen to a whatsapp group and find bills. Then those get added to the Django Database which triggers a second pi + deepseek to OCR them, parse out the data like amount, due date, reference etc, and update the database with that. I have a trigger to 'merge duplicate', which is also just a prompt and pi.
Yes you can do all this without a harness and just the model APIs directly but the harness means it can use linux tools to crop the PDFs etc, so when I also wanted a new feature that crops out the bank details and lets me hover over and see the original before making the payment for a bill that's just another tweak to pi's prompt (or more meta, me prompting my agent to update pi's prompt).
the main thing i use it for that seems like a pain with other coding agents is my sandboxing workflow: i have a custom extension which allows the pi process to run on my laptop, keeping all my transcripts in one searchable place, while delegating all the bash and file system commands to a VM.
i haven't gotten around to it yet, but i'd also like to change how `Bash` functions on a basic level (and subagents), where rather than the agent picking a fixed timeout, it just gets notified with exponential backoff about commands that aren't done and then gets a turn to decide what to do with it.
having said that, i find it annoying and not empowering that basic things like subagents and web search aren't built in. the ideal to me seems to be an agent with polished extensions for all the common use cases that can be disabled if you do want to rewrite them. but i put up with the pain because i really want my pet feature ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Frankly you are not losing much. I've used everything under the sun, for work and fun. I just use Claude now again for work, and I use Pi for any openrouter model I'm using.
Just keep using Claude or Codex.
It's all window dressing and some delta in token usage, but again who cares really?
This really only matters when you're productizing "AI" for your end users, that's when you need to see which agent uses tools better, has more support for MCPs, headless mode, sessions, etc. \
I don't use Pi very much for actual writing code. I have some specific use-cases where I do, but I'm admittedly just not a person who can reasonably juggle a lot of tools or a super personalized setup. I mostly just use Codex or CC from the terminal, though I've recently dabbled with some GUIs. Basically, once I find something that works, I'm pretty reticent to spend any time tinkering unless I feel a real need.
But what I do use Pi a lot for is as a base for agents. I much prefer it to using an agent SDK. I find its minimalism and extensibility to be a really nice substrate for new projects.
I could easily imagine someone getting to a really productive personal setup with it as well, for the same reasons as above.
They are not, Pi is the vim or mechanical keyboard of the pre-AI era. Didn't matter then, doesn't matter now. Will generate infinite discourse regardless.
Pi vs opencode for example is like gentoo vs macos, if you want to spend your time customizing and dealing with harness itself rather than doing the work, then go for it, it will be fun, like gentoo. I think the best productive setup is herdr+opencode or zed and opencode, unless you need CC for anthropic models. The only thing however, is how the same model works with different harnesses, positive or negative, is where you might need to shuffle between to maximize the results.
I use my Pi to organize my graphic design assets as well as update documentation for client projects. It also is my daily driver for a story I'm working on and thanks to a ton of great skills created it has become more powerful.
Local model is Qwen3.6 35B-A3B and Qwen3.8 27B UD. I love the compressing function, keeps on pushing.
I've tried Oh-my-pi but it's too heavy for me and eats up 6% of my context on start. Also I find Pi's keyboard shortcuts easier to use.
I use WSL, one tab is GitBash running llama.ccp and the other is normal terminal running pi. Winning combo for me.
Also started using Pi as my search engine, which I've refine and does what I need it to do, can also ask it to create a html doc with links or markdown. Fun stuff.
I use Pi in the terminal and with Zed (with its "right hand side" terminal bar you can make its agent panel do), and I use it with Pendant in VSCode at home: Pendant is really quite impressive, I'll be honest.
I use pi with a ChatGPT subscription. I find that it does better than the native codex harness:
- it's very token efficient. I've had whole profiling + refactoring sessions finish in <20k tokens, whereas in codex you can get close to that with just all the cruft OpenAI loads by default before you even send your own messages
- the token efficiency means turns are a lot snappier
- fine-grained context control by default - I have to disable a bunch of stuff in codex so it doesn't pollute my context with generated memories
- I find that OpenAI model sometimes struggle to navigate codex' sandboxing, and burn a bunch of tool calls retrying outside the sandbox when the sandboxed command fails
Codex generally lets you use the subscription with 3rd party agents / harnesses.
ON the PI 1.0 you can directly use the openAI log in to hook up your account, so it should be pretty straight forward. I haven't tried myself yet.
Absolutely. Fellow caveman here, and a fan of Pi. I often use it with Astra instead of Codex, because its extensions allow you to connect it to the world. And it works very well.
I use Pi with only a couple of extensions and using less and less of CC and Codex everyday. It feels light and nimble. Codemode from yesterday's release made it even better. I wish I could use my Claude subscription via Pi.
I've put it into an XMPP wrapper for all communications so I can talk to my agents from any device supporting XMPP (all devices). This also means agents can talk to each other using group chats. I'm building apps from my phone on the bus, and handing off server admin tasks to the agents since they run in their own NixOS account with limited permissions.
I've only used it at home a little on personal projects. My usage is probably odd -- I connected it with Bedrock, but otherwise used it the same as I do Claude Code (mostly). My basic flow was simple:
- Ask it to accomplish some coding task
- If it fell short, and I determined that was due to the harness, ask it to patch
- Otherwise proceed to next task
- Rinse + repeat
I run it within a sandbox, so I've been comfortable with the lack of native "approvals". So far my personal usage hasn't really needed subagents, but I think this is one thing I'd need to sort out were I using it professionally[1]. I'm aware of oh-my-pi, but I think half the fun is hacking from the base.
The light weight prompt and simple harness design are a lot of fun. I don't mind Claude Code, and I think its well designed for the problem domain, but Pi is a lot of fun to hack with.
I built and “ide” around it in obsidian. Works great. And I don’t need to jump between apps to change models. Astra and opus in same chat works just fine
I use PI WEB (<a href="https://pi-web.dev" rel="nofollow">https://pi-web.dev, there's more than one with that name) to orchestrate remotely. Pi lets me run local models (currently Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on Strix Halo 128GB) and flagship models (with subscription auth, not API pricing) side by side. I typically ask GPT 6.1 Sol to review requirements and then spawn a subsession with Qwen, review Qwen's work, ask Qwen to fix. About 95% success with a single pass like that, achieving flagship quality without the price tag (albeit slower).
I started using Pi because it has a small system prompt and local models were too slow to start. Then I started adding custom skills and extensions when I hit little corner cases. It's been so easy to bend into what I need.
I have eight or nine custom extensions at varying levels of maturity, some nearing the point where sharing them becomes useful.
One is a simple but obvious Eoka extension for Pi.
I modified my terminal (Alacritty) to support the Kitty image protocol (it already spoke sixel; Pi understandably uses the superior Kitty protocol). And a toolcall that lets the LLM put an image in the transcript (upstream Pi lets only image-modality LLMs do this). "Deepseek, do XYZ in a headful Chromium using Xvfb and show me a screenshot before each step".
Once you see the immense power you get from being able to modify both ends of the terminal connection (and having LLMs write the tests and tedious parts for you) it's addictive. I've added a custom terminal extension for negative-row-number cursor positioning, and support for it on both sides of the connection (Pi and Alacritty). End result: all the performance of native scrollback with no compromises -- Pi can modify rows above the top of the visible part of the screen, like collapsing/expanding toolcalls, without forcing a full-terminal refresh.
I am using pi the same way everyone uses Codex and Claude, but pi makes it very simple to make folders to make the agent behave a certain way and that was easy for me to understand.
ChatGPT Desktop seems to intentionally hide what they are doing and where they are storing state, sessions, config, I never had any idea what is in context or what "archiving" even means. I got sick of OpenAI hiding how ChatGPT Desktop was working. I opened pi and the default behavior shows me how much context I am using, how much that costs and tells me where it stores my session data.
Suddenly it was all demystified and that is why I use pi. It has nothing to do with a functional gap, it was the joy a using a harness that was transparent about how it worked.
Everything is stored locally (expect cloud runs) in ~/.codex
It lists down everything: conversations, skills, prompt plugins, mcp, conversation history.
Writing my own harness with the workflow I prefer. I pull jira tasks in local task manager(aven). My harness will oneshot it or create a spec plan with multiple linked tasks. Implement it with creating git worktree, task by task, codereview with 2 different reviewers, PRs it, reviews peoples comments replies or fixes and check sonarqube and fix if needed.
Manual tests in my minikube and has skills to deploy the right service there. It updates the jira ticket with test proof.
For debugging flows I build skills to use my local minikube that has our full dev environment and all services running. Can debug there. It has grafana skills for gcx can grab logs and through grafana even accesss dev/staging db for quering.
I wrote all the extensions with these custom integrations. It works just like I would work... I don't like adapting myself to another opinionated harness. I prefer my own opinionated workflows.
I use Pi because I fundamentally believe that inference providers are not the correct providers of harnesses. Their incentives are not aligned, and inevitably Claude and codex will continue trying to lock you in to get your inference spend.
A lot of us aren't actually using enough tokens to reach the value add of a $20USD/month subscription versus just paying for the API. Without even mentioning the chinese competitors, you can get a lot of tokens for $10 of ChatGPT Luna, which is more than capable of solving the kinds of problems I have at home (where I use hermes harness).
I'm running it on a docker container that only has mounted a folder from the host os. been playing around with godot and blender. still looking for a good workflow, but pi is lovely.
I've been using Pi almost exclusively as coding agent in various forms since more or less January this year (I think). I settled quickly for a short list of extensions (which I wrote and I maintain) and a few skills/shared AGENTS.md, also installable as extension: <a href="https://forge.l3x.in/alex/pi-shared" rel="nofollow">https://forge.l3x.in/alex/pi-shared
For one thing I've re-built my personal website with it (mostly via GH issues from GH iOS app) and also added a section to talk about how I use AI in general: <a href="https://a.l3x.in/ai" rel="nofollow">https://a.l3x.in/ai
I also maintain a couple of other Pi-related projects:
I built <a href="https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw" rel="nofollow">https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw atop it. It's pi, but with a web UI I use every day, across dozens of agents, and has pi-based add-ons. I do use the TUI on occasion, but need a remote web UI for 99% of my stuff.
I mostly use Pi, with the small exception of using Claude for some more intense coding projects. But for everything else - homelab playgrounds, data stuff, really almost anything else - it's Pi, and I'll probably move my code work there, too. I have a handful of extensions that I like and make it more useful for me, and really like the simplicity of the TUI over some of its competitors.
Pi is the "I use arch btw" of harnesses right now.
But I do love it - super customizable, and my token usage seems way more efficient (this is purely vibe based ofc) compared to codex/cc.
I basically just install pi-fabric, pi-blackhole, grill-me and that's it. Tell my AGENTS.md to prefer subagent workflows. Herdr to manage all the terminals. I spend 99% of my professional work in this environment, I can't even remember the last time I had to open vscode/nvim.
I'm using Pi with Herdr as well right now. It's been quite nice. (I use the organization similar to projects for the Claude / Codex GUIs).
Herdr is OK - but the actual interface / layout is nice. I previously would have like 6 terminals open and would lose track of which was which. I'm not super into the subagent workflows, but it's been helpful a time or two.
The only reason Herdr is just OK is because using agents to collaborate will sometimes just hijack my prompt input field. Maybe I'm using it incorrectly but I would have thought they might have a more elegant solution than that.
wasting_time · · focus · HN ↗
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pizzafeelsright · · focus · HN ↗
Pi is great overall. I ended up deploying a GUI wrapper because TUI isn't as friendly to new adopters.
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<a href="https://github.com/hardbeat920/monocode" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hardbeat920/monocode
But yes, the TUIs are supposed to be lightweight yet it is overall a horrible experience.
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Juvination · · focus · HN ↗
It kind of just gets with how you creative you want to be about it.
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arcanemachiner · · focus · HN ↗
It's kinda a tinkerer hobby IMO. I like the freedom, but at the end of the day, it's still just a harness.
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Oh My Pi comes preloaded with most stuff you need, so there's not much need to add extensions. <a href="https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi
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For example, I started using it, wanted a plan mode, downloaded an extension for it. Wanted to be able to analyze token usage for turn in a session, I had an agent create an extension for that. Then I wanted a custom status bar, so I had an agent implement an extension for that.
jacobgold · · focus · HN ↗
I love open source. I love the terminal. I spent the last 20+ years in a terminal w/vim every single day, and then claude/codex TUIs, and yet I care more about my own productivity so I don't use any of that now.
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For research, planning, figuring out bugs, etc I usually don’t bother creating the worktree until I’ve decided on the implementation.
I’m sure there’s better workflows and software, but all I’ve got for work is gh copilot and Claude enterprise. I like copilot better than Claude for the most part.
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cursor.com
conductor.build
code.visualstudio.com w/ Claude Plugin or equivalent plugin
zed.dev
there are dozens tbh
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I usually start a codex or claude session on the remote host, close my mac, even restart Orca desktop on mac, but when I start Orca, I can watch the Orca on my remote host working through.
It's similar to Claude remote session, but just easier to manage, easier to create worktree, easier to navigate, open multiple tabs etc.
sidrag22 · · focus · HN ↗
Tossed all my weekly usage for each provider at the top with their 5hour windows and such. its been great so far.
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jacobgold · · focus · HN ↗
I usually recommend Conductor to most people. Personally, I use the one I built, but it's got a few ergonomic issues for most people which I still need to fix.
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hakunin · · focus · HN ↗
No affiliation, just arrived at Paseo after a bunch of research.
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I've eventually settled on a CLI agent multiplexer that essentially run in the background while the frontend is a GUI gateway agent to that backend system with a goal middle layer so I no longer need to interject directly into the prompts and forces the CC and Codexes to communicate to me in a structured format relevant to my purpose.
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pkulak · · focus · HN ↗
Even if taking pride in your tools was a productivity killer (I have my doubts), maybe there's mental value to be gained.
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jacobgold · · focus · HN ↗
In Oct 2026, if you're optimizing for productivity, then yes, you probably should just use both Claude and Codex in a GUI agent multiplexer and forget about everything else.
If you care about other things, then have fun, no one is stopping you. I'd disagree with you that using alternatives mean you take more "care" and have more "pride" in your tools, but it's hardly worth arguing over.
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arcanemachiner · · focus · HN ↗
Hell, some extensions could theoretically lower your token burn. (Like rtk, if it actually worked.)
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miroljub · · focus · HN ↗
But you want to forbid those people from driving.
Do you work for Anthropic?
arcanemachiner · · focus · HN ↗
I have another one that allows you to edit the items in your Pi /tree history.
Some permission manager extensions also sit between the model and the harness, and don't actively change the tool or prompt info.
I probably have more, but you get the idea.
razster · · focus · HN ↗
I'm so use to the command keys in Pi that having to type something out in OMP slows me down. I'll stick with Pi, I've built it to my needs and having WSL finally working. I still have to run 2 CLIs, one for LLama.ccp and the other for Pi, not sure if this is normal.
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
omp offers some nice tools, like /shake, to manage context efficiently and offset some of that consumption.
Not sure about your point with command keys. OMP has all kinds of shortcuts and is highly configurable. It seems very unlikely that you cannot achieve what you're looking for in OMP in terms of shortcuts. Specifics would be immensely helpful here.
And yeah, you'll need to run your inference engine separately from your harness, for the same reason the web server and the web browser are different applications.
CharlesW · · focus · HN ↗
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
One example here is that it added MCP extensions to make the harness usable with MCP servers long before Pi figured out that that was the right move. A lot can be said about development of MCP over that timeframe, but I appreciated the bias towards adoption, since progress is driven by empirical experimentation rather than theory in this domain right now.
I've long championed assembling developer tools yourself from scratch and I've been an advocate of vanilla Emacs and customizing it yourself as an ideal developer experience (I realize this opinion is controversial). But OMP is essentially the VSCode to pi's Emacs.
I ended up choosing omp as my daily driver, mostly because I see the velocity of change in AI development being far too fast for me to make a worthwhile investment into customizing the environment myself, since that investment will have a relatively short half-life. With Linux, which I learned more than 30 years ago and still believe to be a fantastic investment, I can largely use the same knowledge I gained then to administer systems today. I fear that much investment in the specific tools that I add to my pi harness will expire before 2027. So I'm sort of drafting OMP until things settle down.
rurban · · focus · HN ↗
ZeWaka · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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orsorna · · focus · HN ↗
pornel · · focus · HN ↗
It automates a lot of the babysitting of agents, and lets me use a couple of smaller models with safeguards instead of burning tokens on a galaxy brain just because it listens to instructions in AGENTS.md.
alostpuppy · · focus · HN ↗
pornel · · focus · HN ↗
what · · focus · HN ↗
r14c · · focus · HN ↗
whiteblossom · · focus · HN ↗
unsnap_biceps · · focus · HN ↗
whiteblossom · · focus · HN ↗
Asooka · · focus · HN ↗
hypercube33 · · focus · HN ↗
vhantz · · focus · HN ↗
hypercube33 · · focus · HN ↗
gedy · · focus · HN ↗
There's definitely a class of folks who like to "polish their tools" per se vs tools just being as a means to an end.
It's fine and cool, sort of like the desktop ricers do with Hyperland, Niri, etc showing off desktops, but never seem to do anything with this cool tech.
BeetleB · · focus · HN ↗
The only thing I've configured is the default model.
sroerick · · focus · HN ↗
ritzaco · · focus · HN ↗
then i use pi in a terminal like a caveman to try the open models like deepseek etc.
I also have pi running on a VPS. I have a custom Django app that calls out to it for a bunch of stuff. I don't know how the full system works because the agents built it but basically I think one pi uses a whatsapp wrapper to constantly listen to a whatsapp group and find bills. Then those get added to the Django Database which triggers a second pi + deepseek to OCR them, parse out the data like amount, due date, reference etc, and update the database with that. I have a trigger to 'merge duplicate', which is also just a prompt and pi.
Yes you can do all this without a harness and just the model APIs directly but the harness means it can use linux tools to crop the PDFs etc, so when I also wanted a new feature that crops out the bank details and lets me hover over and see the original before making the payment for a bill that's just another tweak to pi's prompt (or more meta, me prompting my agent to update pi's prompt).
igorbark · · focus · HN ↗
i haven't gotten around to it yet, but i'd also like to change how `Bash` functions on a basic level (and subagents), where rather than the agent picking a fixed timeout, it just gets notified with exponential backoff about commands that aren't done and then gets a turn to decide what to do with it.
having said that, i find it annoying and not empowering that basic things like subagents and web search aren't built in. the ideal to me seems to be an agent with polished extensions for all the common use cases that can be disabled if you do want to rewrite them. but i put up with the pain because i really want my pet feature ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
nfRfqX5n · · focus · HN ↗
sergiotapia · · focus · HN ↗
Just keep using Claude or Codex.
It's all window dressing and some delta in token usage, but again who cares really?
This really only matters when you're productizing "AI" for your end users, that's when you need to see which agent uses tools better, has more support for MCPs, headless mode, sessions, etc. \
calebkaiser · · focus · HN ↗
But what I do use Pi a lot for is as a base for agents. I much prefer it to using an agent SDK. I find its minimalism and extensibility to be a really nice substrate for new projects.
I could easily imagine someone getting to a really productive personal setup with it as well, for the same reasons as above.
stefan_ · · focus · HN ↗
tamimio · · focus · HN ↗
razster · · focus · HN ↗
I've tried Oh-my-pi but it's too heavy for me and eats up 6% of my context on start. Also I find Pi's keyboard shortcuts easier to use.
I use WSL, one tab is GitBash running llama.ccp and the other is normal terminal running pi. Winning combo for me.
Also started using Pi as my search engine, which I've refine and does what I need it to do, can also ask it to create a html doc with links or markdown. Fun stuff.
andix · · focus · HN ↗
You don’t need extensions or fancy setups.
girvo · · focus · HN ↗
didibus · · focus · HN ↗
darklinear · · focus · HN ↗
culopatin · · focus · HN ↗
coopykins · · focus · HN ↗
kccqzy · · focus · HN ↗
juanre · · focus · HN ↗
lo5 · · focus · HN ↗
rurban · · focus · HN ↗
avazhi · · focus · HN ↗
Like, is this thread full of astroturfing bots? What am I reading
pavo-etc · · focus · HN ↗
stankondrat · · focus · HN ↗
Did you write your own XMPP plugin, or did you use pi-xmpp package?
<a href="https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp" rel="nofollow">https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp
jmcdonald-ut · · focus · HN ↗
The light weight prompt and simple harness design are a lot of fun. I don't mind Claude Code, and I think its well designed for the problem domain, but Pi is a lot of fun to hack with.
Hope that helps!
[1]: <a href="https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#toc_18" rel="nofollow">https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to...
para_parolu · · focus · HN ↗
pettijohn · · focus · HN ↗
pettijohn · · focus · HN ↗
I started using Pi because it has a small system prompt and local models were too slow to start. Then I started adding custom skills and extensions when I hit little corner cases. It's been so easy to bend into what I need.
octoberfranklin · · focus · HN ↗
I have eight or nine custom extensions at varying levels of maturity, some nearing the point where sharing them becomes useful.
One is a simple but obvious Eoka extension for Pi.
I modified my terminal (Alacritty) to support the Kitty image protocol (it already spoke sixel; Pi understandably uses the superior Kitty protocol). And a toolcall that lets the LLM put an image in the transcript (upstream Pi lets only image-modality LLMs do this). "Deepseek, do XYZ in a headful Chromium using Xvfb and show me a screenshot before each step".
Once you see the immense power you get from being able to modify both ends of the terminal connection (and having LLMs write the tests and tedious parts for you) it's addictive. I've added a custom terminal extension for negative-row-number cursor positioning, and support for it on both sides of the connection (Pi and Alacritty). End result: all the performance of native scrollback with no compromises -- Pi can modify rows above the top of the visible part of the screen, like collapsing/expanding toolcalls, without forcing a full-terminal refresh.
Also: click-to-expand/collapse toolcalls/replies individually. Really helpful.
Disappointed that Pi is abandoning the minimality philosophy.
hermannj314 · · focus · HN ↗
ChatGPT Desktop seems to intentionally hide what they are doing and where they are storing state, sessions, config, I never had any idea what is in context or what "archiving" even means. I got sick of OpenAI hiding how ChatGPT Desktop was working. I opened pi and the default behavior shows me how much context I am using, how much that costs and tells me where it stores my session data.
Suddenly it was all demystified and that is why I use pi. It has nothing to do with a functional gap, it was the joy a using a harness that was transparent about how it worked.
sagarpatil · · focus · HN ↗
ramonga · · focus · HN ↗
toadi · · focus · HN ↗
Manual tests in my minikube and has skills to deploy the right service there. It updates the jira ticket with test proof.
For debugging flows I build skills to use my local minikube that has our full dev environment and all services running. Can debug there. It has grafana skills for gcx can grab logs and through grafana even accesss dev/staging db for quering.
I wrote all the extensions with these custom integrations. It works just like I would work... I don't like adapting myself to another opinionated harness. I prefer my own opinionated workflows.
mixermachine · · focus · HN ↗
ew-dev · · focus · HN ↗
Developers just love to spent considerably amount of time and effort into building tooling. Way more than working on the actual products.
But I must admit it is really fun to build your own harness and tweak it to your liking, even if it is never used for professional work ;-)
dozerly · · focus · HN ↗
grim_io · · focus · HN ↗
ImaCake · · focus · HN ↗
dozerly · · focus · HN ↗
igleria · · focus · HN ↗
alexfortin · · focus · HN ↗
For one thing I've re-built my personal website with it (mostly via GH issues from GH iOS app) and also added a section to talk about how I use AI in general: <a href="https://a.l3x.in/ai" rel="nofollow">https://a.l3x.in/ai
I also maintain a couple of other Pi-related projects:
- <a href="https://awesome-pi.site/" rel="nofollow">https://awesome-pi.site/ - <a href="https://github.com/shaftoe/pi-coding-agent-action" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/shaftoe/pi-coding-agent-action
So yeah, I still love the tool and use it pretty much every day, either as TUI sessions or inside CI/CD workflows.
Long live Pi!
rcarmo · · focus · HN ↗
eddieroger · · focus · HN ↗
nvarsj · · focus · HN ↗
But I do love it - super customizable, and my token usage seems way more efficient (this is purely vibe based ofc) compared to codex/cc.
I basically just install pi-fabric, pi-blackhole, grill-me and that's it. Tell my AGENTS.md to prefer subagent workflows. Herdr to manage all the terminals. I spend 99% of my professional work in this environment, I can't even remember the last time I had to open vscode/nvim.
NichoPaolucci · · focus · HN ↗
Herdr is OK - but the actual interface / layout is nice. I previously would have like 6 terminals open and would lose track of which was which. I'm not super into the subagent workflows, but it's been helpful a time or two.
The only reason Herdr is just OK is because using agents to collaborate will sometimes just hijack my prompt input field. Maybe I'm using it incorrectly but I would have thought they might have a more elegant solution than that.