Posted by gidellav 7 hours ago
Is there any API like Pi so that I can create extensions.
I've found is that nearly every extension on the official pi.dev/packages is vibe coded trash, like for example the most popular subagents extension.
Instead of just giving you a basic subagent, it's a whole kitchen sink of recursion, teams, chains, confusingly named agents like "oracle" etc. Basically feels like someone kept prompting "what else could we add here?".
They're all like that. It's no wonder these slow down pi.
What I've done is just have the agent write my own.
Get a local copy of e.g. that kitchen sink subagents extension. Have the agent list all the features, then I give back a much smaller list of the features I want and say "write me a new extension with just these new features" and every time it one shots it (using GPT 5.3 usually), then 20-30 minutes later I have a working, lightweight extension tuned to my exact workflow.
I've done this for I guess about 8 extensions now (subagents, a lightweight typescript LSP, web search, background processes, Claude style hooks, plan mode are the main ones) and it's very fast and snappy.
Imo, this shouldn't be embedded in the executor layer. Orchestration should handle this.
1. Couldn't be built only using prompts
2. Couldn't be built only using MCP servers
3. Would have improved my UX experience (as i hope, your UX experience).
From those three conditions, I chose integrated git worktrees and loops
Appears so, because I am so turned off by it...
1. The tools that are given to the agent are almost the same to the one defined in Opencode, except for Skills and Subagents (both features not implemented in zerostack)
2. Zerostack is prompt-based, so that it ships with a set of .md files, stored in ~/.config/zerostack/prompt, and that can be selected from the TUI in order to activate different 'agents': as you can see from the README, it is designed to contain the most important feautres of superpower + Claude's front-end design + git worktree support and Ralph Wiggum loops (both as integrated features)
2. As said before, there are no benchmarks right now, but it is good enough for me, so I hope it's good enough for y'all :)
3. Transfering settings from other agents is out-of-scope for a minimalstic coding agent, but the idea is that, apart from MCP server, the rest might just force you to learn how zerostack works, because of design choices such as not having Skills or having certain specialized tools integrated (worktrees and loops).
Everyone wants to write one, building a new one is easy to start with, but tough to get to “prod ready” and the landscape is littered with failed attempts?
Certainly feels like it.
This is really good though; works well and at least has a clearly articulated raison d'être.
What do Jetbrains users use then? Amp?
a low level language. please no more scripting language TUIs!
It just does not rely on GC and allows to manage resources efficiently. This efficiency is partly due to its being so high-level.
This is obv only a technical talk, as writing an AI TUI in pure C would be rather... ehhh
Lower-level languages like Zig or even Go, to say nothing of C, lack many of the high-level language features that power this efficiency.
-- So is deepseek-tui.
Although people are complaining about its RAM usage in this thread, I haven't bothered to check how much RAM it uses.