> For a program that's minimal it sure takes a long time to start up, the standard C-p and C-n bindings don't work, it doesn't follow the XDG Base Directory Specification and just pollutes my $HOME directory.

This drives me mad, I believe Ollama and Claude Code also do this. Seems to be rife in the LLM world. IMO there's no excuse for new software sticking dotfiles in my homedir in 2026.

I really really like pi.

But I agree with you, it's biggest weakness is that for a real long time the tagline of it was "there are many harnesses, this one is MINE" (That being Mario's)

I have a lot of respect for Mario and his team, but there's things like you've pointed out that deviate from standards, and other issues that I've seen get posted, only to get knocked down by the team as WON'T FIX because, even though the new owners changed the tagline from MINE to YOURS... It's still very much Mario's.

I do like opinionated things. Truly. But I'm also of the opinion that standards exist for a reason.

That said. I like Pi so much that it's my daily driver, and I've created an ecosystem of plugins to do everything I want, having them all tie together and communicate through the shared bus. Pi is really a good harness.

It's just, well. I don't agree with some of the opinions.

If I'm going to add another thing here... Whilst you cannot get everything you need from the openAI API spec, you can get a surprising amount to get a model config. That said. Versions of Pi are still shipping with model configs for certain inference providers. I do hope that gets decoupled at some stage. I see the groundwork being laid.

So the work is being done in the right direction. I applaud the team but I do get the feeling that a lot of this is because people want to contribute, but the team really wants to hand craft this. And that's great

I've thought about using email and pi, as then the responses can be email patches I can inspect and it's easier to keep multiple threads going. But I've also thought that XMPP makes sense too, and is slightly easier to connect to a VPN rather than setting up mail.

Out of curiosity, do you use the pi-xmpp[1] extension or do you have your own?

[1]: https://pi.dev/packages/pi-xmpp

Same here, though I use Matrix and only have two agents. One for me, one for the family. They are mostly for household management tasks, but mine has an ssh key that lets it remote in to some of my servers and deal with stuff.

That said, I really don’t like “developing” over chat. I’d much rather wait until I’m really available to inspect diffs properly and watch all the thinking and tool use, real time.

https://github.com/pkulak/nix/tree/main/modules/features/ope...

> NixOS is the key to all of this, since agents can interact see the whole server config

We added native support for nixos for the same reason - malleability and debugging becomes easier (also because one of our customers asked us to). I think we might be the only sandbox provider to add this in warm pools.

Interesting setup. Would you still have chosen a Wiki vs a folder of md files if all agents were using a shared filesystem / compute environment (eg personal computer)? I see Wikis often mentioned as shared state stores and I’m trying to figure out what makes people reach for them.

Would that have any real advantage over some "basic" setup (eg tmux running codex, and accessing it through SSH on the phone with Termius)?

I've been able to do 80% of what I needed to do remotely with that setup, so wondering if a more complex setup would really add much...

Pi and XMPP is excellent

Interesting, I would be interested to read more about your setup and workflow

This is cool, I'll have to try this.

Want I've been doing for transit is using termux on android with magisk for root access, allowing me to install Nix home manager and harnesses on my phone, and then drive everything from my phone, including eternal terminal sessions to my homes erver, where it spins up agents there as well.

Incidentally it's also great for debugging issues with my phone.

I’ve been using both families of models inside pi/piclaw (https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw/) and I assure you they work _better_ in that environment than in the originals. The models are not trained to the harnesses, the harnesses provide cues that the models follow.

a few examples:

1) system prompt in pi is quite small (way smaller than the one from OpenCode)

2) when your agents.md file changes pi does not re-spam it (preserves cache, good trade-off!)

3) only 4 tools, every tool comes with a description for how to use it and causes reasoning overhead (fewer tools is good)

all of these things add up

here are pi, opencode and smol working on the same tasks in 9 fresh runs

https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/

you can step through the traces and see how the system prompt + tools steer the agent in a certain way

with GPT 5.6 Sol you can even get away without a system prompt (see smol) and only 1 tool (sh)

The /tree feature is incredible for context management. It's really surprising the other harnesses haven't slurped it up yet. It lets you rewind back to any previous message and fork the conversation from there, removing your 'side quest' (e.g. where you dig into something the agent said) from the context. Some other harnesses have a 'rewind' feature, but this lets you maintain the previous conversation history in a separate thread, and even jump between them.

A lot of harnesses compress the context when it becomes massive, Pi doesn't do that out of the box (EDIT: that's wrong, as pointed out below). It can be both good and bad. Also since it doesn't have a lot of tools out of the box, the context is not polluted with external tool call descriptions that the agent has to be aware of.

Basically, it doesn't handle the context "better", it barely does anything special to it, which can actually be better for cost efficiency.

It's really just the minimal prompt and the minimal built-in skills. And ~full control I guess if you wire up something custom (I haven't).

I don't really get this philosophy, at least with coding harnesses.

I don't want to spend 2 hours prompting, configuring and fixing features that I need which are standard in every other harness. I don't really want to be wasting my tokens to make an application function like every other harness. I don't really want to have to repeat the cycle on every machine I want to work with. Every VM, every server, every laptop.

If you like Emacs, why not make Emacs your harness?

https://github.com/karthink/gptel

Never learned Emacs but am a Neovim user. But similar to what I said to my colleagues as well. Codex, Claude Code are VS Code, Jetbrain. Pi is Neovim.

OMP is great. I pair it with https://nono.sh/ and sleep alot easier at night.

OMP is great to get started with, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there but it's mostly optional and turned off by default (like the memory backend). You can always try it and create a custom Pi config with only the stuff that you find useful if it's too much.

I'm really enjoying the advisor mode (you can have a second model monitor the output of the primary model and have it "steer" the primary when it makes a mistake or goes off the rails) and the automatic fallback to a second provider if the primary one has issues (Deepseek had some issues yesterday).

I need to dive a bit into the system prompt to see how much context OMP actually adds. I think the system prompt is still 2-3k tokens but that probably depends on bells and whistles.

I find omp funny because it's the opposite of why Iike Pi.

I have the same opinion as your first paragraph, but I don't want to spend weeks or months vibe-coding basic features which come built into almost every other agent.

Yeah maybe Claude/OpenCode/KiloCode/Hermes/whatever are not as minimal as Pi but they also work right now.

I couldn't agree more.

I think for indie hackers and people that build their own stack is great, but real scenario and people with money Enterprise likes the idea of batteries included.

I found this one a little bit better and they do support Extensions like Pi. But comes with all features like codex, claude code and it's open-source.

https://github.com/autohandai/code-cli

skills as memory is a great idea

I added that in https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/piclaw a few weeks back. The reason it’s not in pi-ai is that server-side OpenAI compaction is encrypted/opaque and (at least in my experience) can cause issues when switching models.

What it hints at is the direction of model agnostic and custom agents. I could see companies using Pi to create a product for orgs, for example. Low cost and closer to the customer needs than a general harness.

You can also use PI with local models like Qwen3.5-35B-A3B [1] and they can be surprisingly good if you development in minimalistic/simple ways.

One game changer when it comes to tweaking configs that are optimized for your use case is that you can easily use a "more powerful" cloud model to identify a good enough config for your local server/pi settings combination [2] in a pattern that applies pretty much anywhere.

- [1] https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B

- [2] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/find-the-loop-story-first.h...

You can use both providers in Pi using subscriptions. Be careful with Anthropic though, it’s against their TOS.

I always thought that the frontier coding models were specifically trained to perform well in the harness from their providers. I imagine this will always be the case to some extent.

Haven't heard of ohmypi, thanks! I feel like this is a good starting point for someone like me who is not ready to configure a harness from zero right now.

Just install Pi and start using it directly, no extensions needed for Pi to get the job done.

Only when you genuinely find a feature is missing should you write one yourself or have Pi write an extension or skill for you.

Don't use extensions written by others, after all, those extensions were also vibe-coded.

You can just fire it up and ask it to suggest some, or look on the site at the most downloaded and see which sound useful to you. That's basically what I did. I also put in some work to containerize it and do some manual/automatic checks to lock down extensions a bit, but that's just me.

It really doesn't take much for it to be useful, maybe something to search the web?

If you want you can just tell it to write you extensions too, like one to wrap curl so it can get to the web easier for instance. Or just tell it to use curl, really up to you. Just an example to point out: like, do whatever, it's very flexible.

It's already in that minimal but useful state so you can just start and ask it to write code.

If you want a more tricked out "starter pack" there's oh-my-pi or lazypi and maybe a few others. But worth being careful what you install because 1. A full pack of extensions can destroy the minimalism of pi 2. Random extentions are a security nightmare.

Mario recommends you don't do that.

You could try ohmypi but it sort of misses the point.

Why not just install nicopreme's pi-subagents and pi-web-access and then install whatever else you need when you find it's missing?

End up building Pi extensions instead of actual product.

Doesn't make sense to me, but to each their own.

Can file edits be erroneous?

Do you use smol? How do you find it compares to other harnesses for things like MCP connections? I’m tempted to use it since I’m a fan of the philosophy.

It already is, to the point I’ve forked it https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/tau-prime and am playing with bolting on my “standard” web UI onto it.

It's so easy- npm install, a little markdown boot camp, and you get great results.

I just run it as a separate Unix user. Good enough for me.

I started treating my developer workstations like cattle. With a press of a button I can turn a vanilla Ubuntu 22.04.04 server install into my happy-place developer environment. Tools, code, browser -- everything set up exactly the way I want it. I have it synced to a couple of different laptops, and a separate boot drive from my desktop machine. It has a restricted set of SSH keys, and I push code to a separate upstream.

If YOLO MODE causes pi to destroy my workstation (it hasn't yet) I'll just nuke the thing from orbit and spin up a new one.

You might appreciate https://nono.sh/

Its very easy to use and has a pre-made profile for pi. Just do something like `alias pi="nono run -v --profile pi --allow-cwd -- /opt/homebrew/bin/pi"` in your shell.

My very first request, after reading this thread and deciding to try pi out--it went out of the app directory it started in, and made code edits to a sibling directory in a different git project repo.

opencode has never done that.

I'm allured by the minimalism, so I didn't quit there, but I'm not keen on letting it loose with vague instructions, that's for sure.

Yeah, I think Pi is good to use now because the AI has became so good that they almost can run on their own. Previously, AI agents do so many dumb and expected things that I really didn’t want to let them run on a loose leash and manual+automatic approval helped me steer them better. Even now, sometimes agents in Pi do things that startled me when I realized I didn’t explicitly approve that!

I don't really want to do approvals though. Either I put stuff into a real sandbox, or #yolo

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 stop. It's too bloated for me already. It's not minimal enough. If it's minimalism was its strength. it might not even need a sandbox, because it can't run bash commands or update files to begin with.

The secret here is giving pi its own user account on your machine, using Unix permissions.

This is also by design. Pi assumes you’re a power user and you know what you you’re doing and what you want. If sandboxing and the security that Claude and codex offer is something you truly need, pi might not be for you and that’s okay.

Mario talked about the Earendil transition in his blog post here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/

Him and Armin especially, have been involved in OSS for years and have worked hard to build communities around projects they’ve built and maintained. We’ve all seen enough projects become what you’re afraid of, Mario included. I’m optimistic that they’ll keep true to their goal of keeping pi open while building their other products around it. I think they understand the community dynamics necessary to keep a project like pi going. And they want it to succeed that way.

Eh, it's open source. If its closed, fork it, move on. It's entire raison d'etre is to have a very minimal core so it's nature is that the base product isn't actually where the magic exists, but in the extensibility and the ecosystem. It'd be very tough to close that back down now that it's open.

Why is this relevant though? This project is so minimal that forking it at any point since it started “mainstreaming” and implementing any functionality that came after would have been utterly trivial.