I used to have a MCP extension but recently pi added builtin support for MCP so my stack is simpler now.
Thank you for keeping things simple! Simple is beautiful.
- It has 3.6 million weekly NPM downloads.
- 110k GH stars.
- It's 5th (and its fork is 6th and a dependent is 8th) in monthly Openrouter tokens. Add them all together and they get close to Claude Code numbers.
There are maybe 30-60 million software developers and software developer adjacent people on this planet. Out of those probably 30% are late AI adopters, laggards, that haven't even used a terminal client and some don't even use AI.
Also a lot of people - developers included, just don't like command line tools.
Then pi is a secondary harness after Claude, Codex, OpenCode. I imagine the likelihood of pi having more than a few hundreds of thousands of users is remote. It's basically the Emacs or Vim of harnesses.
Though, I realize now the "hundreds of thousands" claim I was responding to is per week, while my guess is all time.
I've been working for 20 years and I've met exactly 1 person daily driving Emacs (at least for a while), probably 10 people daily driving Vim and maybe low hundreds side arming Vim (maybe 5 for Emacs). And I've met or worked with low thousands of people at this point.
If I had to guess, probably 100 000 Vim daily drivers and maybe 20 000 Emacs daily drivers, both for extended periods of time. Dabblers probably 2-3x that at any time.
Not a proof, but that makes it sound more plausible, no?
Minimalism is a difficult subject. In art, minimalists tried to strive for something that is universally minimal. But if you look in nature for straight lines or perfect circles, you end up disappointed. Turns out minimalism found things that were minimal with respect to how some humans think about minimalism. For all we know, pure chaos may be more universally minimal than an empty vacuum.