One thing I do find is that subagents are helpful for performance -- offloading tasks to smaller models (gpt-oss specifically for me) gets data to the bigger model quicker.
You can sandbox off the data.
I hadn't realized that Pi is the agent harness used by OpenClaw.
Small and observable is excellent.
Letting your agent read traces of other sessions is an interesting method of context trimming.
Especially, "always Yolo" and "no background tasks". The LLM can manage Unix processes just fine with bash (e.g. ps, lsof, kill), and if you want you can remind it to use systemd, and it will. (It even does it without rolling it's eyes, which I normally do when forced to deal with systemd.)
Something he didn't mention is git: talk to your agent a commit at a time. Recently I had a colleague check in his minimal, broken PoC on a new branch with the commit message "work in progress". We pointed the agent at the branch and said, "finish the feature we started" and it nailed it in one shot. No context whatsoever other than "draw the rest of the f'ing owl" and it just.... did it. Fascinating.
I only wish the author changed his stance on vendor extensions: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/discussions/254
verdverm•1h ago
I built on ADK (Agent Development Kit), which comes with many of the features discussed in the post.
Building a full, custom agent setup is surprisingly easy and a great learning experience for this transformational technology. Getting into instruction and tool crafting was where I found the most ROI.