I went from TUI and tested several GUIs that can also support a "TUI" view.

After testing several options at the moment I'm using Orca IDE as my daily driver - effectively as a layer on top anthropic / openai

- Supports both anthropic and openai with subscriptions and can you swithc easily between those two + other LLms

- Its a bit hidden / non intuitive to setup but it does support running everything on remove host -> I run (95%) of my jobs on remote hosts that I can both access from my laptop + their native app via a wirguard vpn

- You can switch between chatview + TUI on the same conversation - very useful if you move e.g. from desktop session to mobile view.

- For repeating LLM tasks Orca also suports a kind of scheduler - but I prefer currently to have the agent set things up via chronjobs on the remote machine (not super happy with this ...)

Key reason I dont want to go fully ChatGPT/Claude is also I dont want to build a super strong dependency on those mega players and remain the ability to switch to other interefernce providers / models.

As LLM usage is already a core workflow in our company - a sudden unavailability of one or a massive price increase - makes it absolutely necessary to build out alternatives.

We all know the downsides of SAAS Lock in too well from the 2010s. In that sense Fool me once, fool me twice..

I find TUI scales better for multiple concurrent agents across the same and different codebases, especially using tools such as herdr. I can fire off an agent, which runs sub-agents. Then check-in periodically to re-steer as needed or be interrupt driven for completions of tasks. I can't see how vscode/GUI is better for this?

I also switched to GUI and can't see going back, I think the TUI is kinda cosplay for people wanting to feel closer to the code.

You can get something to manage TUI sessions, but GUI has that by default and is better than the tools I've seen for TUI.

My one thing with the GUI is sometimes I wish I could have more windows open but /side solves 95% of those issues.

I just ended up making my own GUI. I never really liked any of the pre-build ones. It started slow (3-4 days of work) and grew organically around my working style. I can also have my preferred UX (e.g., high information density).

Take a look at the Codex App Server or the Claude Agent SDK as a way to communicate with harnesses running headlessly and build your own UI on top. I’m sure Pi can be set up in a similar fashion.

I hear people swear by https://github.com/getpaseo/paseo

Not only it's a GUI in client-server topology, it can also orchestrate the agents to work for you.

Haven't tried it yet.

I went the same way but found that the GUIs (Claude and Codex Desktop) are still too low-level to scale well. They are basically just tabbed chat windows. I wanted more structure and more targeted UX for managing my work. It's easy nowadays to build your own GUI, so I did.

(I found it's still quite some work to polish it so that it's actually good. Therefore, sharing it could still benefit others, so I did: obeya.si, free, open-source)

I graduated from Claude Code to Herdr to now T3Code.

T3Code can do anything I might need such a tool to. It supports a bunch of different harnesses, therefore also subscriptions. It supports running agents on different servers, from the same GUI. Mobile app that works well. Orchestration that allows any agent to orchestrate others in T3Code directly.

> now I'm using ChatGPT/Claude desktop

Same, it's lovely software for that mode of work!

I also briefly tried out other ADEs, like:

- Kepler (by the GitKraken folks) - https://www.gitkraken.com/kepler

- Paseo - https://paseo.sh/

Kepler had a really nice issue tracker integration but the UI was very vibey and not quite as to the point as I'd like (who needs graph visualization of what the agents do, just give me tools that work), and Paseo had a really nice UI that I could use to drive both Codex and Claude Code, but some OpenCode agents would sometimes hang and I didn't have tools to really do anything about it.

Maybe I should also give JetBrains Air a look again, if I ever end up subscribing to them again (I just moved to Zed for my code editing): https://www.jetbrains.com/air/

Interesting space, with so many additional tools popping up! That said, the OpenCode TUI was really pleasant too.

I can't deal with first party anthropic clients because they're not open source. Think about how long it took them to relent on supporting AGENTS.md. Being subject to that kind of hostile imposition is a non starter for me when such excellent open source alternatives exist.

I don't use the first party codex clients because they don't offer the same level of control as Pi. I just can't live without `/tree` and the ability to use headless neovim as my prompt editor. Maybe there's a decent plug-in system for codex at this point but it would have to actually be superior to pi's for me to consider switching, since I prefer to keep a single harness for all my agents (both OAI's and actually open AI like Kimi), but I might if the product were compelling enough.

As for well-designed open-source third-party harnesses; I'm not at all opposed to GUI. I used conductor and liked it, but again was disappointed by the level of control it provided. And once you get comfortable enough in tmux, it's actually pretty difficult to get a better user experience from a GUI. For instance, scrolling and using the clipboard in tmux are both far more powerful and convenient for me than dragging the mouse or spinning it's wheel. But I anticipate there being a really excellent GUI harness at some point!

""GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, ""

? The GUI has nothing to do with that.

If you use Chat / Work / Code <- that's the differentiation.

So 'Code' in 'Gui' is identical to Claude Code except for the visual layout.

If you use Work or Chat, which are not optimized for Coding you'll see a different experience.

If you use iTerm or Ghostty and set a key combo to switch tabs you can very easily switch between tabs and the TUI generally gives more dense information.

Usually people migrate to TUI not the other way around.

I think that there are reasons to use GUI - if there is deeper integration with Git or an issue tracker - or - in VSCode - for navigating files etc. - definitely those things are valid.

But for raw AI the getting a TUI to work the way you want it is ideal.

The TUI thing always felt like a gimmick to me, it lets non-technical people feel like they’re doing something technical.

I switched from a TUI to OpenChamber, Paseo and now T3. The main features I need are :

-Annotate code diffs and LLM replies.

- Manage multiple agent windows and a branching workflow. I like to ask a lot of questions and go down rabbit holes.

- LaTex rendering.

I will switch to Zed for deeper code exploration and git management.

None of these tools are super mature, I only went with T3 because it seems the furthest along and it’s mobile apps are great, but I see a lot of progress being made as people start to accept that the TUI is more gimmick than optimal workspace.

Herdr changed my tui game. Pi but for tmux.

No I’m not using any GUI because (1) I regularly ssh to many different computers without any GPUs to run Claude; (2) the sandboxing tool required by work is built for TUIs because it highly restricts many kinds of file accesses including ioctls but basically exempts fd 0 and 1. I don’t think /dev/dri even exists in the sandbox; the Firefox browser does not run inside it.

I do not find the arguments against TUI convincing but that is just my experience. I use ghostel and searching in the conversation is so easy. I do not see any major scrolling bugs; I see a couple of small rendering bugs easily worked around by pressing C-l. I work on many projects simultaneously too but I do not understand the need to open one editor instance per project; I have one emacs for everything.

I switched to the Linux desktop as soon as it was available to avoid all of the TUI rendering bugs and restore sensible copy/paste. I was using vscode's git panel to review diffs before they got committed, but had a feeling that there had to be a way to make agents pull harder so my review wasn't always the long pole in the tent.

Imagine a local GitHub PR web UI (thanks to difit), married to your agent for real time in-context discussions, and built-in skills to teach agents how to write easy to follow PR, focusing on both why's and hows.

Last night I released gavel that scratches this itch: it's open source, so fork and enjoy. https://photostructure.com/coding/gavel/

I've lost faith in the ChatGPT desktop app. It's nicer than managing a bunch of TUI sessions, but it's so prone to losing session history / context.

I thought the TUI was the ultimate power tool and loved the original embrace from claude code. I still use TUI a lot, but have been using deepseek harness web app atop my local model and am already liking the better organization and UI of this interface. I can see my load shifting to it. But you are right, you almost always need a VS Code interface open as well.

The outputs of Opus 5.5 were so much easier to read, but I do find the the deepseek web based tool much easier to comprehend for some reason. Plus I can access it from phone (over tailscale) as well when out and about and continue sessions very easily. AND it is all open source/weights. I'm pretty thrilled, but it's been less than a week.

I switched to the GUIs half a year ago and never looked back.

From the text rendering and scrolling alone, they are much more pleasant to work with.

Conversations with activity and MR status indicators, nested sessions, images in the chat, and generally more information and functionality on the screen.

One negative is that it gives Claude, and particularly Codex, room to mess up with auto-opening artifacts.

Codex, when I was still using it, kept opening report or comparison pages in fullscreen when I did not ask for artifacts.

Claude loves to open its iOS simulator pane, but somehow never displays the one it's actually using, instead showing a simulator that is idle. It might be related to my custom tooling.

> The GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections

Much of the nitty gritty is hidden in expandable sections in Claude Code in the terminal now too. Complete with mouse clicks to expand.

> Usually a TUI would be open in VS Code and scoped to whatever repo I'm working with so 10 projects, 10 VS Code instances open, not super scalable.

For my part I'd left-arrow in Claude Code, which gets you the agents backgrounded, so you can switch to any of them in any terminal. Then if I feel the need to look at the code separately I'll work on that in a separate tab. I use a few scripts to assing a default working directory per virtual desktop, so any terminal I open in a given desktop is scoped to the project I work on there anyway.

Not trying to convince you to switch - whatever works for you. For me the TUI harnesses + other terminals in a tiled setup is integrated enough that an IDE doesn't feel worthwhile.

Went from TUI to gui. Main reason because I mostly let the computer do the work and control it from the phone. Was doing that over ssh but the remote web tools are better. Had to write my own wrapper for antigravity because how the google login is handled but hey. That’s what LLMs are for.

I also wrote a chat app between my machines that works over tailscale and can run agents on each.

I am not a terminal head, but I find it simpler to drop into a dir and codex from there. In the GUIs, I often mistakenly end up under the wrong tab (Chat/Work/Code) and if I am in Chat, sooner or later the thing will ask me to switch to Work. On the other hand, the GUI provides the history of threads. I semi defeated this by using hooks to write questions and answers to an SQLite db.

I dislike the harness TUIs for this for the same reasons. Nothing against TUI in general, the lazy* universe for example is great.

OpenChamber (the desktop app, not the VSC extension) for OpenCode currently works best for me. Especially because of its seamless remote control via their iOS app.

> Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?

I generally prefer GUIs but I'm OK with a TUI harness. Anyway, there's a web frontend for Pi (https://github.com/agegr/pi-web) which looks very promising although it still has some rough edges. They even have an interactive demo: https://agegr.github.io/pi-web/

I'm not associated with the project.

I also like the inner text display of the GUI more, but the window management of it terrible IMO. On my Mac I have 3 desktops open, one for "private" and two for a project each. With the Claude TUIs I just have 1-5 open terminals per desktop, each with its title neatly set automatically. With the GUI app, I can only have 1 open, not one per desktop. It seems you can open several very reduced versions of the Claudr app with a single chat but that didn't work well for me. So that's why I'm still with TUIs..

I’m being slowly forced to use a GUI at work, and it’s fine, but I simply prefer the TUI.

I use:

claude agents

Granted, I run it as a terminal tab in my editor so that I can look at files. I prefer the TUI in a tab instead of the editor’s half-assed plugin. These days, however, I mostly look at PRs in the browser.

For my personal work I still prefer to let the agent edit the local files so I can preview the changes in my editor. I avoid PRs in my personal work.

I was confused until you mentioned you were running it in VS Code. That issue goes away if you run it in a standalone terminal with tmux or tabs.

I've tried the ChatGPT/Codex GUI and actually liked it. However a big part of my workflow relies on multi-agent orchestration between codex and claude code, which is still much easier to achieve in the TUI with tools like herdr.

Some of it is the historical snobbery that CLI users have for GUI users. I count myself among them. Isn't it way cooler how I can fix my NIC with just three chained bash commands, while the windows users have to navigate 8 levels of dialogues?

But that mentality doesn't leave room for a lot of nuance. Even the most hard core TUI proponents and neovim gurus probably do not use Lynx as their browser (well maybe they use a vibe coded hacker news TUI client instead)

Im also using the desktop apps (codex/claude). Using the tui doesn’t bring any advantage anymore. I can drag and drop pdfs, images, i have the browser view, can easily switch between conversations, fork them at any point.

I use whatever IDE to review the code, read tests, etc. I used to use the terminal for everything prio AI, but not anymore.

Claude Code - TUI scrolling bugs and overall no project history is annoying. Having all your projects on the left in the GUI, gives me some peace of mind. I usually had several terminal tabs open previously.

Biggest reason I hate TUIs for chats: copy/pasting text from a terminal fucking sucks. Super limiting. (Not that I’m copy pasting code around, but even copying stuff to a message or spreadsheet, or even to a terminal to run myself)

I’m very confused by the replies to this, I have a native GUI for pi, and it enforces all the sandbox policies, remote access, etc. I want while also giving me buttons and nice text rendering. It’s really not that hard to make.

How do you sandbox Claude desktop?

Just GUI now. I can also connect to Mac Codex from my phone and have a voice chat with it. Collects all my work in projects, can jump in and out anytime. Can start a project on the phone, move to Mac. (Almost) No sync issues, which I found the TUI/phone had.

I'm using pi with herdr/ovis, which gets me both a GUI and a TUI. There's a Chat/Terminal switch, which is just a different view of the same pi session. It's got a decent mobile web UI, and I've been really liking it so far.

One of the very first thing you should do is stop using vscode’s terminal.

Use something like Rex, Ghostty, kitty or whatever floats your boat.

You will have a much better experience.

I use the terminal for most of my agentic workflows.

I still use vscode, but only for diffing and the proprietary devcontainer stuff.

I mostly use TUI because I have agents running on different servers over SSH.

I often need agents on one server to talk to a different agent on another server through tmux, and it's just much easier with TUI.

So is the link to the article, here, that you think the switch to this GUI would be better than the switch to Pi? Otherwise I don’t really see the link to the blog post.

No idea what you're working on, but if it's anything involving sifting a lot of data, how do you know if your code actually works or does what Claude says it's doing?

I've always been bewildered by how people seem to prefer TUI for any of this. It's just a strictly worse experience across almost every dimension.

I was using vscode copilot chat for years, but recently got fed up with its bloat, as well as the fact that their supposed unified experience across desktop, web etc just doesn't work.

I tried various gui tools and settled on Open Chamber. Extremely happy with it after a few weeks full time usage. Rarely open vscode.

Would love to use a GUI, however it doesn't work properly for WSL either in 1st party or 3rd party clients like Orca, so I'm stuck with TUI

I'm still using the TUI. I've ditched my IDE and use Sublime Text with LSP for code reviews and navigation. It works great for me.

I use Konsole with a tab per TUI, and the page up/down buttons on my thinkpad for switching tui sessions quickly.

Same here, also mostly use the gui apps, main reason is that I do a significant part of my work on an iPad or iPhone.

VS Code now has the agent mode, but if you have already moved on, there is no point in coming back.

I wanted to use the Claude GUI but it wants me to enable developer mode just to run it on Windows.

is it good now? last year claude GUI was awful, lots of bugs and straight out missing a lot of features

Im still on Emacs with the awesome agent-shell. The use of LLMs have made code review the top prio for any serious development. I basically did a custom theme that shows git diffs inline, then hook that to magit. The final thing is the review process, here i can "talk" to an LLM directly from the code, and ask for changes, or a rewrite when i see slop.

This has been a solid setup, and a must have for agentic development.

How do you handle the errors that the agents make?

How do you handle the potential errors that might be hidden in parts of the code you don’t understand anymore?

Or do you have 100% understanding of the generated code?

Using it with Zed + pi-acp is amazing honestly

I’m using one iTerm to host the TUIs. The RAM cost is a tiny fraction of modern electron-based gui slop

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Most harnesses are not designed with conversations to be append-only from the start, which causes us all endless pain when caching is concerned.

When making a harness, it is so, so easy to do the "web thing" and have your system prompt be a template where you dynamically inject variables like the current date or the contents of the current working directory, and then just re-render that template on every request. THis is a bad, doubleplusungood, terrible, awful idea, and you should never do this under any circumstances. Anthropic will soon force you not to by literally refusing conversations that "break continuity" in this way and do anything but append new user messages at the end, but other providers at least appear to work.

I've only used CC and Pi and the point of pi is to use extensions. Luckily you can write them yourself pretty easily.

I cannot get behind CC is the best harness. Once u switched to pi I knew I was never going back and occasionally I need to use CC for my subscription and find it unpleasant. CC is just this incoherent hodge podge of functionality that seems to have no vision. Subjective, of course.

I've been using claude-bridge [0] and pi-vcc [1] for compaction and it has been a complete life changer. I'm slowly phasing out my Anthropic use for Mistral but I've used it for months without issues.

[0]: https://pi.dev/packages/pi-claude-bridge?name=claude-bridge [1]: https://pi.dev/packages/@sting8k/pi-vcc?name=pi-vcc

> Potential ban due to ToS violation

Anthropic gives monthly API credits for Max and higher subscriptions, equivalent to the subscription cost (so you pay $100 for the Max plan, and you get the normal subscription usage, plus $100 worth of API credits each month). My understanding is you can use those credits with any harness because they are normal API credits that you can use with an API key.

They won't last as long as the subscription itself (they are spent at API prices) but you can use at least use pi.dev with Anthropic models without violating the ToS.

I just want to point out that you’re allowed to use Claude-* models that aren’t a part of your subscription. For example, the ones hosted on openrouter.

Anthropic insists your use of models hosted by them just go through API billing, which is more expensive.

Don’t do sketchy things to use you sub with pi. That’ll get you banned.

Claude models work fine on pi. I’m a happy user.

6. A\ reduce model usage for non-CC client. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/97074

I agree. They are probably solving problems we don’t know are problems, beyond UX (like caching). That’s one of the reasons I prefer CC over Pi. Codex is pretty nice too, with respect to UX.

> 4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);

I'd be curious to know the background around this. At work, I've used @anthropic/Opus 5.5 through Portkey with Pi, and ended up with $10 within less than 10 message exchanges, on a fairly trivial topic. OTOH, when using Claude Code directly with Opus 5.5, I basically spent $30 for a good back-and-forth across a full chat, reaching the point where CC kicked off compaction.

You can write your own compaction function for Pi, and you can even have different, domain specific compaction logic if you want. The default one is dumb, I agree.

Regarding credentials, my base instructions shared across all agents and all harnesses is that all credentials are accessed through a specific powershell script and should never be shown or written to file. This seems to work with pi, opencode.

Using the Agent SDK to connect to Anthropic is an officially supported method and does not risk a ban.

I use a cheap deepseek model for compaction on purpose since it costs a penny or two and does not use any of my Anthropic quota.

> they heavily use custom headers, hidden flags, and undocumented API features that affect models' behavior;

This is exactly why you'd want to use Pi. All these flags and updates to claude code break so many workflows and give a different experience every time you use it. It's highly inconsistent and very annoying.

this is also my fear, after seeing anthropic yank access to openclaw users, they could just as easily restrict users from third party harnesses

Non trivial software projects of course require a bit more organization than most kids will devote to their legos. The ideal solution is to keep your software small and simple so you barely need to think about organization, but if you can't keep it small and simple, then you better not let it turn into a 15kg bag.

Pi is much smaller and simpler than cc, and it's a finished product, not necessarily DIY "legos". You don't have to build plugins for it, and many people say it's superior to CC / codex / OpenCode out of the box. If you do want to build plugins, it already provides you with a well organized system to build around.

Sorting lego? What. Just build stuff, why would you sort it.

> Pi is without contest the best harness. Because it’s yours

You can do this with any harness. I really dislike the Node.js ecosystem and avoid Pi and the like. I started with another one written in Go that has all the basics and I can extend it in minutes for anything I need while keeping track of upstream.

Is OpenCode already passé? Especially with OpenChamber on top I don't see a reason to switch to PI.

Second this, I went from Claude code fighting me all the time and being insanely opaque with its internals to Pi with detailed telemetry about what my agents are actually spending time on. My entire harness is completely custom, and works exactly the way I want it to. Absolutely love Pi

I tend to agree with you. I wrote 4 separate coding harnesses of my own earlier this year (in different programming languages, great learning experience), but pi running good local models like qwen 3.8 next flash, or a deepseek flash API from a vendor with decent privacy assurances is really the bedrock of my workflow. There are always exceptions: running pool harness with Laguna XS 2.1 6bit is a really nice local dev experience for code maintenance and quicker sessions. Also, I very occasionally really enjoy DeepSeek Harness with deepseek flash, CC with Opus 5.5 and agy with the latest Gemini Argon.

So there are many wonderful dev experiences, but generally relying on something relatively simple like pi makes a lot of sense, for my use cases.

>Pi is without contest the best harness.

There is contest.

https://frontierharness.org/

With minimal work, you can get DSH web to be exposed to your internet behind Cloudflare Access (or similar) and have a harness running on your computer at home from any browser, including your phone's.

> it’s yours, the total control is the only way to move from driving agents to orchestrating them

I wrote Juggler (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler) because I liked Pi's approach to everything being customisable and controllable, but I wanted a slick, navigable GUI rather than terminal hell.

...BUT: having gone to great pains to build an architecture around customisation, where every possible pluggable thing is a plugin, I'm starting to feel jaded on the whole "we need to customise it all" mentality. The models have got so good over the last year that I just don't think that tweaking the harness is something many people will need to do as things progress. The models only need a bare-bones set of tools to do everything they need, and I'm starting to think that UX and UI are the only really important things to focus on in an agent.

(Although from the perspective of coding a harness, making things plugins and having a plugin API does help to keep things clean and stops the codebase getting sloppy)

Exactlty. I love that it works the way I want it to work. I can install and write extensions I want.

Which few lines of system prompt?

[flagged]

I just have custom instructions to tell the model to edit files using its tools rather than a gigantic bash pipelines. That's 80% of it.

I just have a hook that tells agents to echo what they're trying to do. Works fine.

alternatively, you could learn to read it

Could you share your setup? is it skill-based? I like the idea of using the model as a tutor/pair programmer so that I stay more grounded rather than delegating too much of the coding to it.

I started using prime-agent [1] after reading the papers and it has been quite good so far. Better development outcomes vs OpenCode with GPT Sol 6.1.

[1] https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-agent

I use Requesty to get access to models from all providers, including Anthropic. It is pretty cheap and competitive with others for the quality. haiku 5.5 is one of the cheapest available, cheaper than Qwen while being superior in the price range (less than 10 cents per million tokens). I put 10 dollars to use on my hobby projects and I still have more than half after a couple of weeks. Using bigger models is dramatically more expensive, of course.

> it because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses.

You're not able to use the API credit and hook it up to another harness?

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/api-credits...

> because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses

I don't think this is true. They never went through with this change. If you use the SDK it appears ToS compliant. You just can't sell it or distribute it, hence why pi doesn't support it.

You can use any harness with claude sub through llm reverse proxy

So you could make yourself much happier at work by paying the $20 yourself

> anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses

they do though?

edit: i guess the parent comment meant subscriptions specifically.

Ueddit link for those who don't want be tracked by Reddit:

https://www.ueddit.com/r/DeepSeek/s/sxg7aAM6rS

X link for people who don’t use Reddit:

https://x.com/DeepSeekHarness/status/2117256196227019194

[flagged]

Alas Opencode's source is hideous to read.

When you say "kinda dumb" it's worth noting that the smaller coding models tend not to actually need system prompts to be helpful coding assistants, etc. Qwen maybe more than Muse Glimmer? I've not tested Qwen 3.8 27B enough yet. Even Gemma 4 didn't seem to need much.

Muse Glimmer is so absolutely tuned for one particular pattern (turn-by-turn agentic coding and assistance) that it will do it more or less without a prompt at all (except to set the reasoning level maybe). Beyond the tools announcement, it feels to me like it almost only needs a prompt to do plan mode stuff. If LM Studio (in either of its forms) or Unsloth Desktop had proper support for running inside a linux container rather than just a filesystem sandbox, you'd barely need a dedicated coding agent at all. Osaurus gets even closer.

I wanted to like Opencode but I can't, really. I am enjoying Pi slightly more because it's just way less convoluted and obscure.

FWIW I use Paseo for the GUI, which to some extent eliminates that aspect of decision fatigue; if you like Paseo's UI well enough, you can have it with almost any harness. And since it can connect to its daemon via ssh you can still have the desktop GUI with a container. (Not clear to me if Opencode v2 Desktop makes remote connections to the daemon or just wraps the web interface like v1 did)

Opencode's system prompt is much smaller than omp. Smaller models may not work well just because of this. Also omp is not pi.

Hah, I grabbed caleb.software way back in 2020. It’s cool and all but I kinda regret not just going with a traditional domain… you’d be surprised how many older sites reject .software as a TLD entirely when creating an account or whatever. Plus namecheap keeps jacking my prices up, $60 to renew this year so I’ll be transferring to cloudflare (still $30/yr, 3x what a .com would cost). I feel kinda locked in at this point but if I ever decide to give it up I’ll shoot you an email.

ohmypi is not pi, it's based on pi, but it's not pi.

Share it please I want to see

Agreed that it's annoying by default, but it's quite easy to disable: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings-reference?ref=expla...

That’s not correct. It depends how you actually connect to the Anthropic API. The Agent SDK is allowed.

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

I have not used them but supposedly you now get API credits with subscriptions now. (I don't know if it's changed but in the past when they've given API promotions it required enabling billing for API and I don't dare risk some bug on their end billing me a billion bucks)

Works on my machine (with OMP). If they ban me I’ll switch to a different provider.

Is that still needed now that Agent SDK usage is included in subscriptions?

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

  Update October 7, 2026: Claude Max, Ultra, and Team plans now include monthly API credits. They cover the Claude API, Claude Managed Agents, and the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p when you run them with an API key from your linked Claude Console organization. Nothing changes for your plan: when you’re signed in with your Claude plan, the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p still draw from your subscription limits.

I use pi.dev since it came out and love it - and pi-claude-code is a great help since Anthropic turned of subscription access. But I also see every day how Claude Code tries to lure me back and often refers to its own skills which then don't work properly eg when spawing sub agents or asking me to run certain commands. Dark TUI Patterns.

dsh-claude-subscription provides a native interface in Deepseek Harness and works great https://github.com/apcamargo/dsh-claude-subscription

> Claude has been reading AGENTS.md files for a while now.

No it hasn’t, this is a very recent addition. Previously you had to symlink CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md, or include a @AGENTS.md in your Claude file, but by itself it would not read it

This only changed recently, in fact the author joked about it happening in response to them switching to pi the day before

Yes, you can use your Codex subscription with Pi without any limitations. It supports Codex out of the box. You may need to install extensions for things like tracking usage and limit resets though. Pi only provides basic Codex integration.

Anthropic's subscription is the one that has historically been tough to use with other harnesses, where they have (had?) technical safeguards to ensure your subscription usage was limited to Claude Code CLI, with third party harnesses often implementing workarounds or faking it to use your Claude.ai subscription. Nowadays Jetbrains Air does officially allow using your Claude.ai subscription.

But OpenAI's subscription has seemingly always been available to use in other harnesses without trouble.

Yes. You can and it's easy to test. I'd also encourage you to try local models with it as well.

Pi/opencode apparently make 10% already of all traffic already:

https://manifest.build/blog/chatgpt-plus-tokens-third-party-...

This, IMO, is one big selling point of Codex for me. The are much more accepting of usage outside of the Codex harness, and make it trivial to set up.

There is no stick unlike Anthropic (along with insisting on signing commits and "don't abuse the robot" the reason I started to use OpenAI instead of Anthropic --- not that I am under the illusion they are any less evil overall) but I think now there is starting to be a carrot towards Codex usage since there sessions are "cached forever". I assume if you use Pi you get 12 hours of cache instead.

Yes and no. Any harness can use the subscription but must go through `claude -p` mode, which is more limited.

Using your subscription in 3rd party tools is explicitly allowed for Codex, and disallowed but not really enforced for Claude. There are extensions for Pi that allow you to log in with your Claude credentials, Codex is iirc even built-in.

Yes, it is allowed and supported normally by pi and others.

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I would not trust auto mode in the first place.

Wrap your agent of choice in e.g. docker sandbox, nono.sh, Nvidia OpenShell, microsanbox or any other sandboxing tool and run it without any checks (i.e. "yolo mode", dangerously-skip-permissions etc.)

IMHO it makes the whole category of problems around permission fatigue, trusting the harness (or plugin) authors etc go away.

Well yeah, the whole point of pi is that you build it to your workflow. If you dislike the entire point of a project, it’s not for you. I run my agents in a sandbox. When Claude or Codex then double sandbox themselves, it gets really annoying.

I use https://pi.dev/packages/pi-warden with Jev (but can use other Decisions API), it would make sense to combine with pi-permission-system to get the CC two stage "default auto" mode.

I wrote pi-automode for exactly that reason. Works well enough for me, YMMV.

https://github.com/czottmann/pi-automode

You'd have to install an extension or write a function that intercepts tool calls.

gotgenes/pi-permission-system and the ai-guard authorizer can do a lot here, it feels very similar to cc auto mode.

I built a policy authorizer on top of pi-permission-system that looks kinda like nftables that models commands/subcommands/options as read/write and enfores policies depending on if the sub agent is read only or write, which really cuts down on the stupid decisions and nicely complements AI cmd review. Pi shines for making things like that possible.

You have time to watch over your agents?

like the auto mode classifier? if it doesn't then... that's a risky tradeoff

Sounds to me like it isnt basic functionality if it all works ;)

> bear bones

*bare

Damn I built almost the exact same thing lol, down the supervisor for each project and web kanban board thing. I use fly.io sprites for the compute which has been cool to experiment with.

I am using https://github.com/melihmucuk/pi-crew which I like more. It has pretty nice pre-defined agent .md files. Then there is also https://github.com/nicobailon/pi-subagents . It is probably worth trying all three and decide. But pi-crew is a winner for me personally.

Note that there is another extension called pi-crew which mentiones in Readme that it was completely vibecoded, I haven't tested that one.

I've been using pi-optchat, might want to give that a try. Manually connecting subagents to the main agent keeps them open indefinitely. https://github.com/jonaslsaa/pi-optchat

Are you not able to /login in pi with your Anthropic enterprise account? Or- do they need users in software that they can manage with enterprise controls?

> The apps I build tend to be the result of several dozen or several hundred features developed mostly serially, and I am always the bottleneck because of that whole "knowing what I want" thing.

This is probably where the disconnect is - the TUI workflow only really clicked when I started working across multiple worktrees at the same time.

It’s not all or nothing. You can still be fully in the loop, read all the code and steer each session towards the outcomes you want. You’re just doing it across multiple branches at the same time and imo it’s easier to do that through the TUI.

The new Herdr desktop has a great theming system. I haven't scratched the surface yet but it's blindingly obvious the future of software is (power) users being 100% in control of their workflow, what it does, how it does it, and how it looks.

Maybe trivial, but changing the font colors, agent status placement & colors increase my productivity 5-10%. I have more ideas like thumbnail previews, but these are specific to the project being worked on.

If you take pi and its extensions, plus herdr desktop, you have an agent that can run the way you want it to, and an app that shows the info you need in the style and way you want it to. I don't think there is one single superior workflow to dominate everything.

The downfall to this is LLMs being trained for their agents. Opus on Claude Code, GPT x.x on Codex. There are certainly strong echoes to vendor lock-in in the past if you look at all of the APIs we used to have with the social web. You could combine this with AI licensing and a national identity verification system and make the whole thing fucking miserable, with locked down hardware & software like iOS. There's a fair chance this could happen, especially in the EU. That and OpenAI + Anthropic merging are two scenarios that would suck.

Try and get on the early access waitlist for Rex, really nice terminal + multiplexer. Ghostty replaced iterm for me and my team, then Rex which uses libghostty was a great level up further.

Man, my M1 Pro unfortunately only has 16GB of RAM; it has been such a limiter to using local models. I'll give kapitsa a try, I see I should be able to squeeze some smaller models on

Something is misconfigured on your end. I have had some trouble where parameters were incorrect, but otherwise I have used several vendors (local, openrouter, ollama cloud, kimi, deep seek) and it generally works.

Most likely context length parameters aren’t set quite right for your model/provider and you genuinely run out of context during compaction

I never really rely on compaction. Instead, I instruct the coding agents to maintain a handoff markdown document across sessions. Ymmv.

Try pi-vcc or pi-blackhole

I’m doing this less since they implemented MCP in pi, which is good for my day job.

For side projects, I now have a bunch of half-assed pi extensions as side projects..

IMHO, you should look for prior art if you really need it to get something done, otherwise, enjoy tinkering!

If it takes you more than 2 weeks to stand up a usable harness that can improve itself (with or without you driving the harness), then use something off the shelf.

Otherwise, go all in.

Source: Daily driving bespoke harness since August.

There are some extensions you can use to use your claude subscription on Pi, it runs Claude Code under the hood but with pi's prompts. The same is possible with Opencode

There is no 20x any longer, no?

It's common to disclose that it's your own project when linking it. Don't mean to be rude or anything.

I am genuinely curious to know what kind of genuine problems people are solving with opus that cant be done with sonnet or the free models. If there are problems that people are working on that only opus 5.5 can solve then were we not touching such problems last year at all (because last years best model was inferior to sonnet 5.5). And if people are solving such problems now, why cant I see any meaningful improvement in even a single software I use everyday?

Not trying to diss on anything or anybody. I want to know.

I don’t think OP is proposing using a local model?

Why do you limit yourself to mac?

You can run larger flash models on a modern PC using strata. These models perform pretty good even on low quants.

Furthermore, next generation open weight models will swap some compute for storage, making them more accessible for masses.

That’s not what OP is saying at all. Pi is another coding agent.

I don't get why many of the products from major providers are GUIs, don't they know how to generate a proper terminal-based tool?

Turns out, no. There's a Hemingway quote that greatly describes the current AI situation: never confuse movement for action.

OMP is great for anyone who doesn't have the time and/or inclination to figure out all of the pieces neccessary to turn Pi, which is really a kernel, into an effective, battieries-included coding harness.

'Tis a joke. His landing page says he's a dev at Salesforce, so I presume not famous.

I’m definitely not famous :^) thanks for reading!

It’s not that unreasonable, or at least wasn’t a few years ago. I complained about the Chatgpt Pro $200 not allowing basically unlimited image generation (the limits were super low) a couple years ago and the next day Sam Altman tweeted asking about switching up how they handle Pro plans and putting usage into a single pool (which is what they moved to). If he didn’t read my email directly the gist at least got to him.

>> Someone at Anthropic must’ve caught wind… just a day after making my decision, they announced Claude Code would finally start supporting AGENTS.md files in an effort to get me to stay.

> Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous?

I think that was tongue in cheek. And by that I don't mean the author's tongue was actually in his cheek.

I also think it went over your head. And by that I don't mean I think it literally went over your head.

Alternatively, what you’re seeing is continuous hill climbing and optimisations based on large scale experiments and simulated rollouts.

For me personally, I don’t use Claude Code because I can’t read the source.

At least with Codex, I know there’s a bunch of telemetry and all that, but I can have my agent inspect the source and have relatively greater confidence it’s not implanting spyware onto my machine, because a classifier thinks I’m working for Deepseek or something.

WRT security, I recommend you skynot to use Pi (it's in the sweet-spot IMO): https://www.npmjs.com/package/skynot

I wrote it, in case you have any questions AMA.

Claude now supports AGENTS.md fully but the rest of what you said holds

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Harness has vast impact on performance, cost and how you extend functionality.

I use firejail to deny access to some folders.

An accountless provider such as PPQ.ai or NanoGPT (and these also have auto-models so that the best model can be chosen depending on how easy or hard your prompt it). If you like this idea, use this pi extension to use them: https://www.npmjs.com/package/awto-pi-lot

ChatGPT plus or pro

lithosai, it's awesome

i would say this is a basic feature of any coding agent on the market

> At this point, you probably don't need either.

There's only so much stuff I have the patience to tell it in a session before I write it down somewhere.

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Now they just need to solve MCP standardization across agents

It's free?

> How does this help with anything

It lets you get a feel for what it's currently working on and what files it's touching. A sidebar is a nice place to put it.

It's not obsoleted by opening the changes in git or an editor since those don't answer the question of what it's doing right now.

The typical solution of expandable inline code diffs is annoying in practice.

Made me click, but I have no idea what this is supposed to be.