People really need to try out “less is more”. The new models are quite smart, so suffocating their context with dozens of MCPs and skills isn’t necessary like it used to be. A cli tool with good built in help and good errors is amazingly easy for the model to figure out.
If Pi is too minimal for you and you don’t want to dig into it, OpenCode is pretty good out of the box. I use it for general work I haven’t setup Pi for. The only thing I add to OpenCode is some commands that are shortcuts to save me typing frequent prompts, and a subagent with a fixed model for implementing changes.
I would like to migrate away from Claude Code and use Pi as my "peimary" harness. I really like in particular how it manages conversation trees and branches.
But I think I didn't do a good job in customizing it for my work. While nothing dramatic, I think the LLM I was using did a better job on Claude Code than on Pi a couple of time when I tried giving it the same work.
I was not sure how to improve on it though.
That said, sometimes it is really easy to leverage existing extensions. You run the risk of supply chain attack though. I installed one extension that was useful, modified it to my needs and pinned it.
- Review to check that the plugin is reasonable quality/isn't malicious.
- hosting (e.g. the plugin is retrieved from a repo. you control) or "known good" checksums so pi will only download the plugin with a version that you've reviewed.
From a security/supply chain aspect, ironically what you're looking to do is deliberately add some friction to the publishing process, which sounds bad, but can be quite effective at mitigating attacks. Most of the recent supply chain attacks get found by automated scanners in < 24 hours, so having a review process for new releases that takes a while will reduce the number that affect users.
I think having this is handy as it'll give security conscious users more confidence in using pi, without the anxiety of pulling a load of additional code from effectively random sources.
Curated. Not exhaustive.
Every package is hand-picked.
Anyway, if this works for someone, great. I’m a novice Pi user which I think would be the target audience, I don’t see why I would use this, both because it appears to be LLM slop and because it bedazzles up a tool that I started using in the first place because of its minimalism, but to each his own.
From my limited time using pure Pi, I found quite a few of the plugins lacking and had no desire to upgrade/fix and maintain them myself. I know others feel differently though.
I like the idea of keep Pi minimal but having “official”, high quality optional plugins to make it more usable.
I guess it's the same kinda friction with vanilla vim/neovim vs vim 'distributions' that provide a bunch of stuff out of the box.
clusterhacks•1h ago
But I like pi precisely because it is so minimal. I want understand and work around the simplest possible agentic coding setup, find the sharp edges, maybe even improve my prompting ability. And doing all three with a locally hosted LLM.
At some point, if I don't understand the foundations, am I just punting on actually thinking about what I'm doing?
Of course, making individual choices about how to do agentic coding are precisely just making individual choices. People should do what makes them happy and productive.