To me, the most interesting thing about Pi and the "claw" phenomenon is what it means for open source. It's becoming passé to ask for feature requests and even to submit PRs to open source repos. Instead of extensions you install, you download a skill file that tells a coding agent how to add a feature. The software stops being an artifact and starts being a living tool that isn't the same as anyone else's copy. I'm curious to see what tooling will emerge for collaborating with this new paradigm.
throwaway13337 3 hours ago [-]
I see this happening, too.
We know that a lack of control over their environment makes animals, including humans, depressed.
The software we use has so much of this lack of control. It's their way, their branding, their ads, their app. You're the guest on your own device.
It's no wonder everyone hates technology.
A world with software that is malleable, personal, and cheap - this could do a lot of good. Real ownership.
The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation.
I'm quite optimistic for this future.
hdjrudni 2 hours ago [-]
That's just because corporations got greedy and made their apps suck.
Strip away the ads, the data harvesting, add back the power features, and we'll be happy again. I'm more willing than ever to pay a one-time fee good software. I've started donating to all the free apps I use on a regular basis.
I don't want to own my own slop. That doesn't help me. Use your AI tools to build out the software if you want, but make sure it does a good job. Don't make me fiddle with indeterministic flavor-of-the-month AI gents.
peepee1982 2 minutes ago [-]
What you're describing is the expected and correct outcome inside a profit-oriented, capitalist system. So the only way I see out of this situation would be changing policy to a more socialist one, which doesn't seem to be so popular among the tech elite, who often think they deserve their financial status because of the 'value' they provide, without specifying what that value is (or its second-order consequences). Whether that's abusing a monopolistic market position they lucked into, making apps as addictive as possible, or building drones that throw bombs on newborns in hospitals.
safety1st 2 hours ago [-]
I think there's room for both visions. Big Tech is generating more toxic sludge than ever, and yeah sure this is because they're greedy, but more precisely the root cause is how they lobbied Washington and our elected officials agreed to all kinds of pro-corporate, anti-human legislation. Like destroying our right to repair, like criminalizing "circumvention" measures in devices we own, like insane life-destroying penalties for copyright infringement, like looking the other way when Big Tech broke anti-trust laws, etc.
The Big Tech slop can only be fixed in one way, and actually it's really predictable and will work - we need to fix the laws so that they put the rights and flourishing of human beings first, not the rights and flourishing of Big Tech. We need to fix enforcement because there are so many times that these companies just break the law and they get convicted but they get off with a slap on the wrist. We need to legislate a dismantling of barriers to new entrants in the sectors they dominate. Competition for the consumer dollar is the only thing that can force them to be more honest. They need to see that their customers are leaving for something better, otherwise they'll never improve.
But our elected officials have crafted laws and an enforcement system which make 'something better' impossible (or at least highly uneconomical).
Parallel to this if open source projects can develop software which is easier for the user to change via a PR, they totally should. We can and should have the best of both worlds. We should have the big companies producing better "boxed" software. Plus we should have more flexibility to build, tweak and run whatever we want.
bergfest 18 minutes ago [-]
And then they will take away your right to boot whatever you want. For national security reasons and the children, of course.
axelthegerman 4 hours ago [-]
And how great it will be to troubleshoot any issues because everyone is basically running a distinct piece of software
theshrike79 18 minutes ago [-]
It's like the dude who monkey-patches their car and goes to the dealer to complain why the suspension is stiff.
It's because you put 2by4's in place of the shocks, you absolute muppet. And then they either give them a massive bill to fix it properly or politely show them out.
Same will happen in self-modifying software. Some people are self-aware enough to know that "I made this, it's my problem to fix", some will complain to the maker of the harness they used and will be summarily shown the door.
wrxd 25 minutes ago [-]
I don’t want to be the one who has to upgrade this software + vibe coded patches.
It’s going to be very likely that once something is patched is to be considered as diverged and very hard to upgrade
sshine 4 hours ago [-]
... made minutes ago.
krickelkrackel 53 minutes ago [-]
So everybody will be using (sometimes slightly, sometimes entirely) different software. Like mutations, these adapt to the specific problems in the situation they were prompted to be programmed.
CuriouslyC 3 hours ago [-]
The skill for feature thing is just horrible, it's wasteful to everyone but the maintainer. It feels like a YOLO people are getting away with because people drank some kool-aid.
theshrike79 18 minutes ago [-]
Think of skills more like Excel macros (or any other software with robust macro support). It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to provide the specific workflow you need, but your own sheet needs it.
rcarmo 9 hours ago [-]
My current fave harness. I've been using it to great effect, since it is self-extensible, and added support for it to https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes because it is so much faster than ACP.
badlogic 8 hours ago [-]
wow, i love this! was about to build this myself, but this looks exactly what i want.
rcarmo 8 hours ago [-]
The better web UI is now part of https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw (which is essentially the same, but with more polish and a claw-like memory system). So you can pick if you want TS or Python as the back-end :)
badlogic 8 hours ago [-]
if i ever want a claw, i'd obv. go with this :)
rcarmo 8 hours ago [-]
The claw version’s web UI essentially has better thinking output, more visibility of tool calls, and slightly better SSE streaming. I’ve backported some of it to vibes, but if you want to borrow UI stuff, the better bits are in piclaw. I use both constantly on my phone/desktop.
gusmally 6 hours ago [-]
Which ones have you compared it against?
baby 3 hours ago [-]
Wdym harness? Its a coding agent
furryrain 2 hours ago [-]
I think the thesis of Pi is that there isn't much special about agents.
Model + prompt + function calls.
There are many such wrappers, and they differ largely on UI deployment/integration. Harness feels like a decent term, though "coding harness" feels a bit vague.
buremba 53 minutes ago [-]
I spent 3 months adopting Codex and Claude Code SDKs only to realize they're just vendor lock-in and brittle. They're intended to be used as CLI so it's not programmable enough as a library. After digging into OpenClaw codebase, I can safely say that the most of its success comes from the underlying harness, pi agent.
pi plugins support adding hooks at every stage, from tool calls to compaction and let you customize the TUI UI as well. I use it for my multi-tenant Openclaw alternative https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu
If you're building an agent, please don't use proprietary SDKs from model providers. Just stick to ai-sdk or pi agent.
siva7 16 minutes ago [-]
I also wondered for months why it feels so difficult to use Openai or Anthropic SDKs until i came to a similar conclusion.
tmustier 7 hours ago [-]
I haven’t met a single person who has tried pi for a few days and not made it their daily driver. Once you taste the freedom of being able to set up your tool exactly how you like, there’s really no going back.
and you can build cool stuff on top of it too!
sshine 4 hours ago [-]
> I haven’t met a single person who has tried pi for a few days and not made it their daily driver.
Pleased to meet you!
For me, it just didn’t compare in quality with Claude CLI and OpenCode. It didn’t finish the job. Interesting for extending, certainly, but not where my productivity gains lie.
esafak 2 hours ago [-]
People seem to be really enjoying rolling everything themselves these days...
ixsploit 19 minutes ago [-]
Because it’s very easy todo nowadays. Why making compromises in your workflow anymore?
ck_one 6 hours ago [-]
What self-built capabilities do you like the most that claude code doesn't offer?
Pi has made all the right design choices. Shout out to Mario (and Armin the OG stan) — great taste shows itself.
semiinfinitely 8 hours ago [-]
I do not understand why in the age of ai coding we would implement this in javascript
thomasfromcdnjs 34 minutes ago [-]
I am building an entire GPT model framework from the ground up in Typescript + small amounts of c bindings for gpu stuff. https://github.com/thomasdavis/alpha2 (using claude)
Don't hate me aha and no, there is no reason other than I can
mccoyb 7 hours ago [-]
It’s straightforward: JavaScript is a dynamic language, which allows code (for instance, code implementing an extension to the harness) to be executed and loaded while the harness is running.
This is quite nice — I do think there’s a version of pi’s design choices which could live in a static harness, but fully covering the same capabilities as pi without a dynamic language would be difficult. (You could imagine specifying a programmable UI, etc — various ways to extend the behavior of the system, and you’d like end up with an interpreter in the harness)
At least, you’d like to have a way to hot reload code (Elixir / Erlang could be interesting)
This is my intuition, at least.
jatari 7 hours ago [-]
Code hotloading isn't a particularly difficult feature to implement in any language.
jauntywundrkind 4 hours ago [-]
Rust can't even dynamically link!
I'm super on board the rust train right now & super loving it. But no, code hot loading is not common.
Most code in the world is dead code. Most languages are for dead code. It's sad. Stop writing dead code (2022) was no where near the first, is decades and decades late in calling this out, but still a good one. https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/
jasonjmcghee 2 hours ago [-]
Incredible talk and I agree with all the things and I've worked on this problem a bunch.
But Rust can dynamically link with dylib but I believe it's still unstable.
It can also dynamically load with libloading.
mccoyb 7 hours ago [-]
Sure, but why implement a novel language with said feature if your concern is a harness ... not on implementing a brand new language with this feature?
sergiomattei 6 hours ago [-]
I built my own harness on Elixir/Erlang[0]. It's very nice, but I see why TypeScript is a popular choice.
No serialization/JSON-RPC layer between a TS CLI and Elixir server. TS TUI libraries utilities are really nice (I rewrote the Elixir-based CLI prototype as it was slowing me down). Easy to extend with custom tools without having to write them in Elixir, which can be intimidating.
But you're right that Erlang's computing vision lends itself super well to this problem space.
Fwiw @dicklesworthstone / jeff Emanuel is definitely my favorite dragon rider right now, doing the most with AI, to the most effect.
Their agent mail was great & very early in agent orchestration. Code agent search is amazing & will tell you what's happening in every harness. Their Franktui is a ridiculously good rust tui. They have project after project after project after project and they are all so good.
Didn't know they had a rust Pi. Nice.
7 hours ago [-]
Blackarea 7 hours ago [-]
yes! I just don't understand that as well. Up until some time ago claud code's preferred install was a npm i, wasn't it? Please serious answers for why anyone would use a web language for a terminal app
fragmede 3 hours ago [-]
Because it's what the person writing it's preferred language.
So it can share code with the web app.
Because writing it in javascript is easier than writing it in raw brute forced assembly.
7 hours ago [-]
moonlion_eth 5 hours ago [-]
i wrote an agent in zig, it kinda sucks tho. the language is just words
Pi was probably the best ad for Claude Code I ever saw.
After my max sub expired I decided to try Kimi on a more open harness, and it ended up being one of the worst (and eye opening experiences) I had with the agentic world so far.
It was completely alienating and so much 'not for me', that afterwards I went back and immediately renewed my claude sub.
I had a very similar experience. I have different preferences, but ultimately, my takeaway was that if I want to follow my own version of their philosophy, I should just create my own thing.
In the meantime, the codex/cc defaults are better for me.
mccoyb 6 hours ago [-]
> I would say that the project actively expects you to be downloading them to fill any missing gaps you might have.
Where did you get this perspective from?
> I thought pi and its tools were supposed to be minimal and extensible. So why is a subagent extension bundling six agents I never asked for that I can’t disable or remove?
Why do you think a random subagents extension is under the same philosophy as pi?
Your blog post says little about pi proper, it's essentially concerned with issues you had with the ecosystem of extensions, often made by random people who either do or do not get the philosophy? Why would that be up to pi to enforce?
CGamesPlay 4 hours ago [-]
> if I start the agent in ./folder then anything outside of ./folder should be off limits unless I explicitly allow it, and the same goes for bash where everything not on an allowlist should be blocked by default.
Here's the problem with Claude Code: it acts like it's got security, but it's the equivalent of a "do not walk on grass" sign. There's no technical restrictions at play, and the agent can (maliciously or accidentally) bypass the "restrictions".
That's why Pi doesn't have restrictions by default. The logic is: no matter what agent you are using, you should be using it in a real sandbox (container, VM, whatever).
esafak 2 hours ago [-]
But the agent has to interact with the world; fetch docs, push code, fetch comments, etc. You can't sandbox everything. So you push that configuration to your sandbox, which is a worse UX that the harness just asking you at the right time what you'd like to do.
CGamesPlay 5 minutes ago [-]
Well, you are imagining a worse UX, but it doesn't have to be. Pi doesn't include a sandboxing story at all (Claude provides an advisory but not mandatory one), but the sandbox doesn't have to be a simple static list of allowed domains/files. It's totally valid to make the "push code" tool in the sandbox send a trigger to code running outside of the sandbox, which then surfaces an interactive prompt to you as a user. That would give you the interactivity you want and be secure against accidentally or deliberately bypassing the sandbox.
NamlchakKhandro 4 hours ago [-]
hypegrift
ge96 8 hours ago [-]
Is that an official term "coding harness"
Wondering if you wanted a similar interface (though a GUI not just CLI) where it's not for coding what would you call that?
Same idea cycle through models, ask question, drag-drop images, etc...
arcanemachiner 7 hours ago [-]
Yes. It seems to be the term that stands out the most, as terms like "AI coding assistant", "agentic coding framework", etc. are too vague to really differentiate these tools.
"harness" fits pretty nicely IMO. It can be used as a single word, and it's not too semantically overloaded to be useful in this context.
rcarmo 8 hours ago [-]
LLM harness has been in vogue for a year now…
outofpaper 8 hours ago [-]
A harness is a collection of stubs and drivers configured to assist with automation or testing. It's a standard term often used in QA as they've been automating things for ages before Gen Ai came on to the scene.
arcanemachiner 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, it is also a device used to control the movement of work animals, which farmers have been using for ages before QA came on to the scene.
chriswarbo 6 hours ago [-]
I've been using pi via the pi-coding-agent Emacs package, which uses its RPC mode to populate a pair of Markdown buffers (one for input, one for chat), which I find much nicer than the awful TUIs used by harnesses like gemini-cli (Emacs works perfectly well as a TUI too!).
The extensibility is really nice. It was easy to get it using my preferred issue tracker; and I've recently overridden the built-in `read` and `write` commands to use Emacs buffers instead. I'd like to override `edit` next, but haven't figured out an approach that would play to the strengths of LLMs (i.e. not matching exact text) and Emacs (maybe using tree-sitter queries for matches?). I also gave it a general-purpose `emacs_eval`, which it has used to browse documentation with EWW.
dnouri 5 hours ago [-]
Nice! I'm curious to hear how you're mapping `read` and `write` to Emacs buffers. Does that mean those commands open those files in Emacs and read and write them there?
Let me also drop a link to the Pi Emacs mode here for anyone who wants to check it out: https://github.com/dnouri/pi-coding-agent -- or use: M-x package-install pi-coding-agent
We've been building some fun integrations in there like having RET on the output of `read`, `write`, `edit` tool calls open the corresponding file and location at point in an Emacs buffer. Parity with Pi's fantastic session and tree browsing is hopefully landing soon, too. Also: Magit :-)
I've been using Pi day to day recently for simple, smaller tasks. It's a great harness for use with smaller parameter size models given the system prompt is quite a bit shorter vs Claude or Codex (and it uses a nice small set of tools by default).
rpastuszak 7 hours ago [-]
Which models do you use and what for? I'm looking for ideas to play with.
jmorgan 25 minutes ago [-]
For local models I've been trying it with GLM-4.7-Flash and the new LFM2 24B model. I'm excited to try it with the new Qwen3.5 models that came out today as well.
ianlpaterson 3 hours ago [-]
Coming from OpenClaw, it's pretty amazing how fast pi is, particularly paired with Qwen3 that dropped today. It's a magical time.
jasonjmcghee 1 hours ago [-]
What dropped today? Wasn't Qwen3 Coder Next released beginning of the month?
Qwen3.5 released a couple of days ago but I'm not that RAM rich
breisa 42 minutes ago [-]
Alibaba released a whole set of new Qwen 3.5 models including a ~120B and a ~35B MoE.
kristianpaul 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed, it seems to just works with a self hosted Qwen3 coder next.
mongrelion 8 hours ago [-]
Pi ships with powerful defaults but skips features like sub-agents and plan mode
Does anyone have an idea as to why this would be a feature? don't you want to have a discussion with your agent to iron out the details before moving onto the implementation (build) phase?
In any case, looks cool :)
EDIT 1: Formatting
EDIT 2: Thanks everyone for your input. I was not aware of the extensibility model that pi had in mind or that you can also iterate your plan on a PLAN.md file. Very interesting approach. I'll have a look and give it a go.
ramoz 8 hours ago [-]
See my comment in the thread but there is an intuitive extension architecture that makes integrating these type of things feel native.
I plan all the time. I just tell Pi to create a Plan.md file, and we iterate on it until we are ready to implement.
8 hours ago [-]
jauntywundrkind 4 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I rarely find the guardrails of plan to be necessary; I basically never use it on opencode. I have some custom commands I use to ask for plan making, discussion.
As for subagents, Pi has sessions. And it has a full session tree & forking. This is one of my favorite things, in all harnesses: build the thing with half the context, then keep using that as a checkpoint, doing new work, from that same branch point. It means still having a very usable lengthy context window but having good fundamental project knowledge loaded.
There are already multiple implementations of everything.
With a powerful and extensible core, you don't need everything prepackaged.
8 hours ago [-]
arjie 9 hours ago [-]
Has anyone used an open coding agent in headless mode? I have a system cobbled together with exceptions going to a centralized system where I can then have each one pulled out and `claude -p`'d but I'd rather just integrate an open coding agent into the loop because it's less janky and then I'll have it try to fix the problem and propose a PR for me to review. If anyone else has used pi.dev or opencode or aider in this mode (completely non-interactive until the PR) I'd be curious to hear.
EDIT: Thank you to both responders. I'll just try the two options out then.
chriswarbo 7 hours ago [-]
pi has an RPC mode which just sends/receives JSON lines over stdio (including progress updates, and "UI" things like asking for confirmation, if it's configured for that).
That's how the pi-coding-agent Emacs package interacts with pi; and it's how I write automated tests for my own pi extensions (along with a dummy LLM that emits canned responses).
fred_tandemai 8 hours ago [-]
Been using pi exactly for this and it's working great!
rcarmo 9 hours ago [-]
You probably want to look into pi then - it's extremely extensible.
What are people using to cost efficiently use this? I was using a Google Ultra sub which gave enough but that’s gone now.
ChatGPT $20/month is alright but I got locked out for a day after a couple hours. Considering the GitHub pro plus plan.
UncleOxidant 3 hours ago [-]
Run Qwen3-coder-next locally. That's what I'm doing (using LMstudio). It's actually a surprisingly capable model. I've had it working on some LLVM-IR manipulation and microcode generation for a kind of VLIW custom processor. I've been pleasantly surprised that it can handle this (LLVM is not easy) - there are also verilog code that define the processor's behavior that it reads to determine the microcode format and expected processor behavior. When I do hit something that it seems to struggle with I can go over to antigravity and get some free Gemini 3 flash usage.
zirror 2 hours ago [-]
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
kristianpaul 3 hours ago [-]
Same here
lambda 5 hours ago [-]
Qwen3 Coder Next in llama.cpp on my own machine. I'm an AI hater, but I need to experiment with it occasionally, I'm not going to pay someone rent for something they trained on my own GitHub, Stack overflow, and Reddit posts.
beacon294 5 hours ago [-]
FWIW the lockout probably wasn't related... maybe the content you were working on or your context window management somehow triggered something?
rahimnathwani 4 hours ago [-]
You could try minimax 2.5 via openrouter.
ursuscamp 4 hours ago [-]
MiniMax has an incredibly affordable coding plan for $10/month. It has a rolling five hour limit of 100 prompts. 100 prompts doesn't sound like much, but in typical AI company accounting fashion, 1 prompt is not really 1 prompt. I have yet to come even close to hitting the limit with heavy use.
20022026 4 hours ago [-]
Anyone tried pi with 5.3-codex vs codex cli?
muratsu 7 hours ago [-]
I’m working with a friend to build an ui around Pi to make it more user friendly for people who prefer to work with a gui (ala conductor). You can check out the repo: https://github.com/philipp-spiess/modern
ramoz 7 hours ago [-]
In the same spirit, I also ported a planning UI extension for Pi.
ive been using pi for about a week as daily driver and so far im happy with it. I really like the modular concept and also that its rather minimal
isagawa-co 6 hours ago [-]
Interesting approach to planning via extensions. I took a similar direction with enforcement. A governance loop that hooks into the agent's tool calls and blocks
execution until protocol is followed. Every 10 actions (configurable), the agent re-centers. No permission popups, but the agent literally can't skip steps.
The way you’re able to extend the harness through extension/hook architecture is really cool.
Eg some form of comprehensive planning/spec workflow is best modeled as an extension vs natively built in. And the extension still ends up feeling “native” in use
Yeah I wrote a small landlock wrapper using go-landlock to sandbox pi that works well (not public, similar projects are landrun and nono).
Note that if you sandbox to literally just the working directly, pi itself wont run since pretty much every linux application needs to be able to read from /usr and /etc
fjk 8 hours ago [-]
I’ve been tinkering with Gondolin, a micro-vm agent sandbox.
I do this with an extension. I run all bash tools with bwrap and ACLs for the write and edit tools. Serves my purposes. Opens up access to other required directories, at least for git and rust.
I think I published it. Check the pi package page.
lukasb 8 hours ago [-]
But I can't use my Codex plan with it, right? I have to use an API key?
mccoyb 8 hours ago [-]
You can use your Codex plan with it. OpenAI endorsed it several weeks ago, as far as I remember. That could change, however, but now seems safe.
ac29 6 hours ago [-]
You can use your Claude or Gemini plan with it too for now, though Anthropic and Google have made it clear this is a ToS violation.
theshrike79 7 hours ago [-]
Pi makes GPT-5.3-Codex act about on par with Claude easily.
There's something in the default Codex harness that makes it fight with both arms behind its back, maybe the sandboxing is overly paranoid or something.
With Pi I can one-shot many features faster and more accurately than with Codex-cli.
TacticalCoder 4 hours ago [-]
Naming skills though...
mobrienv 5 hours ago [-]
Another batteries included pi setup. Built a lightweight mobile webui to run it on termux and code on my phone.
Pi treats you like an adult and shows whatever the fuck LLM is doing rather than actively hiding shit from the user. And just for that, once you tasted the freedom and transparency, there’s no way to go back to CC.
TZubiri 5 hours ago [-]
I think OpenCode is the same.
They are all open source though so you can just find out whats going on if you want right?
fnord77 4 hours ago [-]
I mean using the captive agents is much cheaper than supplying your api key to a 3rd party agent.
TZubiri 5 hours ago [-]
Wtf is that example gif?
The prompt shown is
"Who's your daddy and what does he do?"
Is this a joke or tech? Is the author a dev or a clown?
NamlchakKhandro 4 hours ago [-]
No one cares about your opinions.
This coding agent certainly couldn't give a fuck.
enneff 3 hours ago [-]
It’s a quote from the movie Kindergarten Cop.
agentwyz 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
prakashrj 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cyanydeez 9 hours ago [-]
The backing to OpenClaw/MoltBot whatever they're calling themselves. Why is it insecure, well, Pi tells you >No permission popups.
Anyway, even if you give your agent permission, there's no secure way to know whether what they're asking to is what they'll actually do, etc.
chriswarbo 6 hours ago [-]
> Why is it insecure, well, Pi tells you >No permission popups.
Pi supports permission popups, but doesn't use them by default. Their example extensions show how to do it (add an event listener for `tool_call` events; to block the call put `block: true` in its result).
> there's no secure way to know whether what they're asking to is what they'll actually do
What do you mean? `tool_call` event listeners are given the parameters of the tool call; so e.g. a call to the `bash` tool will show the exact command that will execute (unless we block it, of course).
himata4113 9 hours ago [-]
you want to put agents in a sandbox instead such as bwrap anyways.
cermicelli 9 hours ago [-]
Just how expensive was that domain?
jotaen 9 hours ago [-]
README on Github says “pi.dev domain graciously donated by exe.dev” (though that doesn’t say anything about the original price of course).
We know that a lack of control over their environment makes animals, including humans, depressed.
The software we use has so much of this lack of control. It's their way, their branding, their ads, their app. You're the guest on your own device.
It's no wonder everyone hates technology.
A world with software that is malleable, personal, and cheap - this could do a lot of good. Real ownership.
The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation.
I'm quite optimistic for this future.
Strip away the ads, the data harvesting, add back the power features, and we'll be happy again. I'm more willing than ever to pay a one-time fee good software. I've started donating to all the free apps I use on a regular basis.
I don't want to own my own slop. That doesn't help me. Use your AI tools to build out the software if you want, but make sure it does a good job. Don't make me fiddle with indeterministic flavor-of-the-month AI gents.
The Big Tech slop can only be fixed in one way, and actually it's really predictable and will work - we need to fix the laws so that they put the rights and flourishing of human beings first, not the rights and flourishing of Big Tech. We need to fix enforcement because there are so many times that these companies just break the law and they get convicted but they get off with a slap on the wrist. We need to legislate a dismantling of barriers to new entrants in the sectors they dominate. Competition for the consumer dollar is the only thing that can force them to be more honest. They need to see that their customers are leaving for something better, otherwise they'll never improve.
But our elected officials have crafted laws and an enforcement system which make 'something better' impossible (or at least highly uneconomical).
Parallel to this if open source projects can develop software which is easier for the user to change via a PR, they totally should. We can and should have the best of both worlds. We should have the big companies producing better "boxed" software. Plus we should have more flexibility to build, tweak and run whatever we want.
It's because you put 2by4's in place of the shocks, you absolute muppet. And then they either give them a massive bill to fix it properly or politely show them out.
Same will happen in self-modifying software. Some people are self-aware enough to know that "I made this, it's my problem to fix", some will complain to the maker of the harness they used and will be summarily shown the door.
It’s going to be very likely that once something is patched is to be considered as diverged and very hard to upgrade
Model + prompt + function calls.
There are many such wrappers, and they differ largely on UI deployment/integration. Harness feels like a decent term, though "coding harness" feels a bit vague.
pi plugins support adding hooks at every stage, from tool calls to compaction and let you customize the TUI UI as well. I use it for my multi-tenant Openclaw alternative https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu
If you're building an agent, please don't use proprietary SDKs from model providers. Just stick to ai-sdk or pi agent.
and you can build cool stuff on top of it too!
Pleased to meet you!
For me, it just didn’t compare in quality with Claude CLI and OpenCode. It didn’t finish the job. Interesting for extending, certainly, but not where my productivity gains lie.
Went from codex/claude code -> opencode -> pi -> oh-my-pi
https://x.com/victormustar/status/2026380984866710002
Don't hate me aha and no, there is no reason other than I can
This is quite nice — I do think there’s a version of pi’s design choices which could live in a static harness, but fully covering the same capabilities as pi without a dynamic language would be difficult. (You could imagine specifying a programmable UI, etc — various ways to extend the behavior of the system, and you’d like end up with an interpreter in the harness)
At least, you’d like to have a way to hot reload code (Elixir / Erlang could be interesting)
This is my intuition, at least.
I'm super on board the rust train right now & super loving it. But no, code hot loading is not common.
Most code in the world is dead code. Most languages are for dead code. It's sad. Stop writing dead code (2022) was no where near the first, is decades and decades late in calling this out, but still a good one. https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/
But Rust can dynamically link with dylib but I believe it's still unstable.
It can also dynamically load with libloading.
No serialization/JSON-RPC layer between a TS CLI and Elixir server. TS TUI libraries utilities are really nice (I rewrote the Elixir-based CLI prototype as it was slowing me down). Easy to extend with custom tools without having to write them in Elixir, which can be intimidating.
But you're right that Erlang's computing vision lends itself super well to this problem space.
[1]: https://github.com/matteing/opal
Their agent mail was great & very early in agent orchestration. Code agent search is amazing & will tell you what's happening in every harness. Their Franktui is a ridiculously good rust tui. They have project after project after project after project and they are all so good.
Didn't know they had a rust Pi. Nice.
So it can share code with the web app.
Because writing it in javascript is easier than writing it in raw brute forced assembly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120784
After my max sub expired I decided to try Kimi on a more open harness, and it ended up being one of the worst (and eye opening experiences) I had with the agentic world so far.
It was completely alienating and so much 'not for me', that afterwards I went back and immediately renewed my claude sub.
https://www.thevinter.com/blog/bad-vibes-from-pi
In the meantime, the codex/cc defaults are better for me.
Where did you get this perspective from?
> I thought pi and its tools were supposed to be minimal and extensible. So why is a subagent extension bundling six agents I never asked for that I can’t disable or remove?
Why do you think a random subagents extension is under the same philosophy as pi?
Your blog post says little about pi proper, it's essentially concerned with issues you had with the ecosystem of extensions, often made by random people who either do or do not get the philosophy? Why would that be up to pi to enforce?
Here's the problem with Claude Code: it acts like it's got security, but it's the equivalent of a "do not walk on grass" sign. There's no technical restrictions at play, and the agent can (maliciously or accidentally) bypass the "restrictions".
That's why Pi doesn't have restrictions by default. The logic is: no matter what agent you are using, you should be using it in a real sandbox (container, VM, whatever).
Wondering if you wanted a similar interface (though a GUI not just CLI) where it's not for coding what would you call that?
Same idea cycle through models, ask question, drag-drop images, etc...
"harness" fits pretty nicely IMO. It can be used as a single word, and it's not too semantically overloaded to be useful in this context.
The extensibility is really nice. It was easy to get it using my preferred issue tracker; and I've recently overridden the built-in `read` and `write` commands to use Emacs buffers instead. I'd like to override `edit` next, but haven't figured out an approach that would play to the strengths of LLMs (i.e. not matching exact text) and Emacs (maybe using tree-sitter queries for matches?). I also gave it a general-purpose `emacs_eval`, which it has used to browse documentation with EWW.
Let me also drop a link to the Pi Emacs mode here for anyone who wants to check it out: https://github.com/dnouri/pi-coding-agent -- or use: M-x package-install pi-coding-agent
We've been building some fun integrations in there like having RET on the output of `read`, `write`, `edit` tool calls open the corresponding file and location at point in an Emacs buffer. Parity with Pi's fantastic session and tree browsing is hopefully landing soon, too. Also: Magit :-)
Qwen3.5 released a couple of days ago but I'm not that RAM rich
Does anyone have an idea as to why this would be a feature? don't you want to have a discussion with your agent to iron out the details before moving onto the implementation (build) phase?
In any case, looks cool :)
EDIT 1: Formatting EDIT 2: Thanks everyone for your input. I was not aware of the extensibility model that pi had in mind or that you can also iterate your plan on a PLAN.md file. Very interesting approach. I'll have a look and give it a go.
https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...
As for subagents, Pi has sessions. And it has a full session tree & forking. This is one of my favorite things, in all harnesses: build the thing with half the context, then keep using that as a checkpoint, doing new work, from that same branch point. It means still having a very usable lengthy context window but having good fundamental project knowledge loaded.
There are already multiple implementations of everything.
With a powerful and extensible core, you don't need everything prepackaged.
EDIT: Thank you to both responders. I'll just try the two options out then.
That's how the pi-coding-agent Emacs package interacts with pi; and it's how I write automated tests for my own pi extensions (along with a dummy LLM that emits canned responses).
https://github.com/elyase/awesome-personal-ai-assistants?tab...
ChatGPT $20/month is alright but I got locked out for a day after a couple hours. Considering the GitHub pro plus plan.
https://plannotator.ai/blog/plannotator-meets-pi/
Open source: https://github.com/isagawa-co/isagawa-kernel
Eg some form of comprehensive planning/spec workflow is best modeled as an extension vs natively built in. And the extension still ends up feeling “native” in use
Nearly all of its value is facilitating your interaction with the LLM, the tools it can use, and how it uses them.
Note that if you sandbox to literally just the working directly, pi itself wont run since pretty much every linux application needs to be able to read from /usr and /etc
Here’s an example config: https://github.com/earendil-works/gondolin/blob/main/host/ex...
I think I published it. Check the pi package page.
There's something in the default Codex harness that makes it fight with both arms behind its back, maybe the sandboxing is overly paranoid or something.
With Pi I can one-shot many features faster and more accurately than with Codex-cli.
https://github.com/mikeyobrien/rho
They are all open source though so you can just find out whats going on if you want right?
The prompt shown is
"Who's your daddy and what does he do?"
Is this a joke or tech? Is the author a dev or a clown?
This coding agent certainly couldn't give a fuck.
Anyway, even if you give your agent permission, there's no secure way to know whether what they're asking to is what they'll actually do, etc.
Pi supports permission popups, but doesn't use them by default. Their example extensions show how to do it (add an event listener for `tool_call` events; to block the call put `block: true` in its result).
> there's no secure way to know whether what they're asking to is what they'll actually do
What do you mean? `tool_call` event listeners are given the parameters of the tool call; so e.g. a call to the `bash` tool will show the exact command that will execute (unless we block it, of course).