Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Long-time pi user here. If you're thinking of trying out pi but feel daunted by finding the right plugins to get started, I wrote about my minimal pi setup here:
https://github.com/richardgill/pi-extensions/blob/main/PI_SE...
It's still pretty minimal and brings back just enough stuff that I don't miss Claude Code.
Pi's plugins are its strength, but also its weakness, because most feel more like personal vibe-coding projects than seriously maintained tools.
- If anyone's looking for something a bit more minimal, I can't recommend hax [0] enough. No MCP, agent just gets a shell tool, simple config, whole thing's in C.by ltrg
- I don't understand why "Cache warming for anthropic models" was not put into a standalone package, but has to be bundled with the "minimal" coding agent.by utilize1808
- So, how are people actually using Pi? Here I am with Claude Code and Codex in a terminal like a caveman.by wasting_time
- I wonder how Tolkien would’ve thought about the use of LotR names being used by all these AI and tech companies.. especially since they all seem to use the names of things that were corrupted by darkness.by rylando
- It's so great to see now that the folks behind Pi also try to pivot away from the idea that Pi is more than a "coding" agent. Its minimalism, and tool call primitives really lends itself to be a general purpose agent for your OS that you gradually extend on demand for your specific use case.
Since January I use Pi professionally as well as personally and I can only recommend to start small and grow your harness over time. For example, for an agent in production it was so helpful for me to use Pi in interactive mode via tmux to get a feel of the agentic flow, tool calls and reasoning traces for a certain use case while only the stylized responses are rendered in Telegram via an extension to the user. As a Developer, I have full technical observability and control while providing and incrementally improving a service to a user at the same time.
Excited how Pi Durable will fit in and can support more. Congrats and thank you!
by ttmacer - Love pi. I tried to run some local models and pi was the only one that actually worked decently because it didn’t have a gargantuan system prompt that would take minutes to prefill on my scrawny ass laptop.
Been running it almost barebones vanilla for a couple of months. Just a bunch of basic extensions and some skills.
Now, if only they could fix the very annoying bug of the history jumping back at the beginning if I am not a the end while the model is reasoning that would great.
by FacelessJim - Every few weeks Pi hits #1 here and I quietly grumble "mine does that too, but with lovely graphics.", so I'm saying it out loud: https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler
Like Pi, it's plugins all the way down, provider-agnostic, minimal system prompts, threaded sub-agents, code-mode, multi-client remote sessions, worktrees, a context window you can actually see and edit, etc etc
Where Pi is way ahead is the plugin ecosystem, and that takes people, which is hard to get amid the current deluge of agent action. So if there's any spare oxygen trailing off this thread, I'd love any Pi-heads who fancy a bit of GUI action to come and kick the tyres..
by julesrms