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Posted by kristianpaul 8 hours ago

Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness(pi.dev)
252 points | 106 commentspage 2
20022026 3 hours ago|
Anyone tried pi with 5.3-codex vs codex cli?
jmorgan 8 hours ago||
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 6 hours ago|
Which models do you use and what for? I'm looking for ideas to play with.
mongrelion 7 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 7 hours ago||
See my comment in the thread but there is an intuitive extension architecture that makes integrating these type of things feel native.

https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...

alvivar 7 hours ago|||
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.
jauntywundrkind 3 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.

miroljub 7 hours ago|||
Check https://pi.dev/packages

There are already multiple implementations of everything.

With a powerful and extensible core, you don't need everything prepackaged.

arjie 8 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 6 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 7 hours ago|||
Been using pi exactly for this and it's working great!
rcarmo 8 hours ago|||
You probably want to look into pi then - it's extremely extensible.
dosinga 8 hours ago|||
you can run https://block.github.io/goose/ in headless mode (I work on goose)
evalstate 7 hours ago||
fast-agent lets you do this as well (and has a skill in its default skills repo to help with automation/running in container/hf job).
type4 5 hours ago||
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 2 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 1 hour ago|||
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
kristianpaul 2 hours ago|||
Same here
lambda 4 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 3 hours ago||
You could try minimax 2.5 via openrouter.
ursuscamp 3 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.
moonlion_eth 4 hours ago||
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
elyase 6 hours ago||
there is also pz a drop-in replacement for pi rewritten in Zig. 1.7MB static binary, 3ms startup, 1.4MB RAM idle. Find more at:

https://github.com/elyase/awesome-personal-ai-assistants?tab...

snthpy 31 minutes ago||
Cool, thanks for this. What about the extensions though? For me the point about pi is minimal base plus configurable extensions you choose.
_neil 4 hours ago||
Direct link to pz for those on mobile: https://github.com/joelreymont/pz
muratsu 6 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 6 hours ago|
In the same spirit, I also ported a planning UI extension for Pi.

https://plannotator.ai/blog/plannotator-meets-pi/

isagawa-co 5 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.

Open source: https://github.com/isagawa-co/isagawa-kernel

ramoz 7 hours ago|
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

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