I used to use ChatGPT/Claude in the TUI up until like 3 months ago, but my usage of LLMs has exploded - many sessions across many projects. I feel like I outgrew the TUI and now I'm using ChatGPT/Claude desktop. VS Code has become a code review tool and place where I manage git if need be.
The GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, which makes history easier and cleaner to scroll through, also no scrolling bugs, rich text is easier to read with tables, and images integrated into the chat, resources like browsers in the context of the session. Drag and drop session organization (pins), scheduled tasks, etc.. all that in the side bar.
Usually a TUI would be open in VS Code and scoped to whatever repo I'm working with so 10 projects, 10 VS Code instances open, not super scalable. With the GUI desktop app it's one app, and I can start sessions in an repo and switch between them easily, no need to open VS Code for each. I don't see what could make me want to go back to using a TUI.
Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?
I just ended up making my own GUI. I never really liked any of the pre-build ones. It started slow (3-4 days of work) and grew organically around my working style. I can also have my preferred UX (e.g., high information density).
Take a look at the Codex App Server or the Claude Agent SDK as a way to communicate with harnesses running headlessly and build your own UI on top. I’m sure Pi can be set up in a similar fashion.
I've been building my own open-source coding agent, VT Code, in Rust.
I wanted more control over the harness itself, especially tool execution, sandboxing, approvals, and context management.
Recently built a native macOS app with GPUI on top of the same agent runloop. It's been interesting exploring how the same engine works across terminal and desktop workflows.
I did this for myself several times. I started with winforms and evolved into a full blown clone of ChatGPT.com experience built as a razor/MVC project in .NET10.
I have 2 versions that are just for working on unity projects. One that is for working on the client project. There is also one that I refer to as the ring of power / Death Star that I keep mostly to myself. Eventually, the client saw what I was doing and decided they wanted a custom ChatGPT.com experience for the whole team, so I got paid to build the most recent one.
Using AI to assist with the development of this stuff is the RSI you've been looking for. I'm in a situation where I was only able to solve a problem due to two levels of bootstrapping enabled by custom harnesses. The product the client uses cannot be "one shot" using the latest frontier tools. I had to build an ad-hoc agent loop fit for just that one purpose using another tool that was possible to build via copilot. For example, using copilot in VS over a unity project's scripts might as well be a drunk person throwing darts from a boat compared to a purpose built harness that can execute ad-hoc scripts in the editor environment as often as it pleases.
The client's custom experience is better than ChatGPT.com in many important ways now. It certainly performs better. It will run on safari without doing horrific things to layout and my CPU. You can easily exceed the capabilities of the frontier AI companies in ways that are important if you use their tools cleverly. These companies are great at making AI models. Not harnesses, websites, apps, etc.
I have the same setup. All you need is a server hosted on your own machine and a few adapters to connect them to providers using ACP and various thin client all connected through tailnet. I have developed my own web and mobile applications with gemini live full duplex routing to opus my local projects and maintain the same session across any platform I choose, including Hermes. Building personal software is easy these days.
I thought the TUI was the ultimate power tool and loved the original embrace from claude code. I still use TUI a lot, but have been using deepseek harness web app atop my local model and am already liking the better organization and UI of this interface. I can see my load shifting to it. But you are right, you almost always need a VS Code interface open as well.
The outputs of Opus 5.5 were so much easier to read, but I do find the the deepseek web based tool much easier to comprehend for some reason. Plus I can access it from phone (over tailscale) as well when out and about and continue sessions very easily. AND it is all open source/weights. I'm pretty thrilled, but it's been less than a week.
People seem to forge Claude has a very powerful GUI as well. I don’t get why most still seem to be using it in the terminal instead. A bit like emacs. The GUI is infinitely superior to use!
Look, it's just a tool, you are a developer, you've used TUIs all your career, this is just one more TUI, no different than your beloved Vim or Emacs. No need to be scared, this won't replace you because mere mortals won't know what to do with a TUI, so you can use it freely and get more work done, just as you were always obsessed with doing when configuring your Vim bindings.
Then, a year in, when everybody is hooked line and sinker, people start to understand that the TUI is the least important part of the whole thing, and the model and harness are what really matters.
Claude Web app includes Claude code tab with remote option to work from your own machine (if preferred). I am using it very often.
I have a project folder which is my default environment, and within it I have my many repo clones. That way I can work on any project from my prompt and reference elements in one project to include in another.
I dislike the harness TUIs for this for the same reasons. Nothing against TUI in general, the lazy* universe for example is great.
OpenChamber (the desktop app, not the VSC extension) for OpenCode currently works best for me. Especially because of its seamless remote control via their iOS app.
""GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, ""
? The GUI has nothing to do with that.
If you use Chat / Work / Code <- that's the differentiation.
So 'Code' in 'Gui' is identical to Claude Code except for the visual layout.
If you use Work or Chat, which are not optimized for Coding you'll see a different experience.
If you use iTerm or Ghostty and set a key combo to switch tabs you can very easily switch between tabs and the TUI generally gives more dense information.
Usually people migrate to TUI not the other way around.
I think that there are reasons to use GUI - if there is deeper integration with Git or an issue tracker - or - in VSCode - for navigating files etc. - definitely those things are valid.
But for raw AI the getting a TUI to work the way you want it is ideal.
I don't get why people love TUIs so much. They're basically GUIs made using inferior tools. Why hammer in a nail using your fist if you have a hammer handy?
A GUI is strictly more powerful than a TUI (because a GUI could just show plain text in cases where that is the most appropriate mode of interaction, E.G. Bloomberg, AMadeus), but it could also do so much more in cases where it is not.
I do love terminals, don't get me wrong. When what you're interacting with is CLIs and Unix tools in a shell, a terminal is exactly what you want. I do love the Unix philosophy, I like small and composable tools that you can use together, and I think the interactive way of working that a shell or REPL can give you is great (though notebooks would have been better, but that's beside the point). Those are things that the terminal shines at. Pretending to be a GUI is not one of those things.
Are you saying I should go back to GUI? I just feel it’s so awkward. I have LazyVim for more advanced review, Hunk, etc… the GUI is like a inferior version of Eclipse IDE or something. Or it used to be, atleast.
It's because you can ssh into something and VNC sucks.
GUIs are great when you're sitting in front of the computer it's running on. Trying to do anything remotely with them is terrible. RDP is pretty great at making that experience suck less tho.
Personally the Claude Code TUI also sucked every time i used it. Scrollback bugs in IDEA embedded shells, extraneous output vs the VSCode extension, and unreliable links to source code.
Isn't the CC TUI written in React?? I mean my web dev "all i have is this hammer" brain is intrigued, but surely, there's better things to do? Like you said, the terminal is great for piping inputs and outputs, for scripting, for bulk operations. It's really not great for real time interaction across many files, which is how i use CC and kind of wonder how you would use it any other way. (I guess if you literally just prompt and pray, the UI literally doesn't matter?)
I went the same way but found that the GUIs (Claude and Codex Desktop) are still too low-level to scale well. They are basically just tabbed chat windows. I wanted more structure and more targeted UX for managing my work. It's easy nowadays to build your own GUI, so I did.
(I found it's still quite some work to polish it so that it's actually good. Therefore, sharing it could still benefit others, so I did: obeya.si, free, open-source)
> Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?
I generally prefer GUIs but I'm OK with a TUI harness. Anyway, there's a web frontend for Pi (https://github.com/agegr/pi-web) which looks very promising although it still has some rough edges. They even have an interactive demo: https://agegr.github.io/pi-web/
I went from TUI and tested several GUIs that can also support a "TUI" view.
After testing several options at the moment I'm using Orca IDE as my daily driver - effectively as a layer on top anthropic / openai
- Supports both anthropic and openai with subscriptions and can you swithc easily between those two + other LLms
- Its a bit hidden / non intuitive to setup but it does support running everything on remove host -> I run (95%) of my jobs on remote hosts that I can both access from my laptop + their native app via a wirguard vpn
- You can switch between chatview + TUI on the same conversation - very useful if you move e.g. from desktop session to mobile view.
- For repeating LLM tasks Orca also suports a kind of scheduler - but I prefer currently to have the agent set things up via chronjobs on the remote machine (not super happy with this ...)
Key reason I dont want to go fully ChatGPT/Claude is also I dont want to build a super strong dependency on those mega players and remain the ability to switch to other interefernce providers / models.
As LLM usage is already a core workflow in our company - a sudden unavailability of one or a massive price increase - makes it absolutely necessary to build out alternatives.
We all know the downsides of SAAS Lock in too well from the 2010s. In that sense Fool me once, fool me twice..
I switched to the GUIs half a year ago and never looked back.
From the text rendering and scrolling alone, they are much more pleasant to work with.
Conversations with activity and MR status indicators, nested sessions, images in the chat, and generally more information and functionality on the screen.
One negative is that it gives Claude, and particularly Codex, room to mess up with auto-opening artifacts.
Codex, when I was still using it, kept opening report or comparison pages in fullscreen when I did not ask for artifacts.
Claude loves to open its iOS simulator pane, but somehow never displays the one it's actually using, instead showing a simulator that is idle. It might be related to my custom tooling.
No idea what you're working on, but if it's anything involving sifting a lot of data, how do you know if your code actually works or does what Claude says it's doing?
Some of it is the historical snobbery that CLI users have for GUI users. I count myself among them. Isn't it way cooler how I can fix my NIC with just three chained bash commands, while the windows users have to navigate 8 levels of dialogues?
But that mentality doesn't leave room for a lot of nuance. Even the most hard core TUI proponents and neovim gurus probably do not use Lynx as their browser (well maybe they use a vibe coded hacker news TUI client instead)
Pi is a good harness (I finally gave it a try w/ abliterated GLM), but not with Anthropic subscription, and there are multiple reasons to avoid alternative harnesses with their models in general (imho):
1. Potential ban due to ToS violation;
2. It doesn't follow all Anthropic's communication mechanisms out-of-the-box, they heavily use custom headers, hidden flags, and undocumented API features that affect models' behavior;
3. Compact is better in CC (significantly);
4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);
5. It's almost unavoidable to use Pi's extensions, and I wouldn't trust my oauth token to anything third-party (take a look at regular reddit/X posts where people getting banned due to such leaks and abuse) -> it takes enormous amount of hacking on top of Pi to get closer to CC abilities.
CC has hooks and mods, even ui_* (undocumented) protocol if you need some big customization, those are enough to implement whatever you want on top of CC.
Also, I'm working with CC from the very first versions, as for me - it's the best harness (as-is) on the market. I have zero clue what problems people are talking about (except known big issues, 3-4 over the years, I've never had serious problems, at all). Seamless and smooth experience, optimized for Anthropic models.
P.S. You can consider this as Stockholm syndrome effect, but... you have close to zero chances to get unbanned with Anthropic, and it's the best coding model(s) available today.
> 4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);
I'd be curious to know the background around this. At work, I've used @anthropic/Opus 5.5 through Portkey with Pi, and ended up with $10 within less than 10 message exchanges, on a fairly trivial topic. OTOH, when using Claude Code directly with Opus 5.5, I basically spent $30 for a good back-and-forth across a full chat, reaching the point where CC kicked off compaction.
I've only used CC and Pi and the point of pi is to use extensions. Luckily you can write them yourself pretty easily.
I cannot get behind CC is the best harness. Once u switched to pi I knew I was never going back and occasionally I need to use CC for my subscription and find it unpleasant. CC is just this incoherent hodge podge of functionality that seems to have no vision. Subjective, of course.
I use both but I’m fairly new to Pi. For now things that I notably miss in Pi are plan mode and subtasks. I was also a bit surprised that it doesn't have default permission mode (deny all) like CC. It’d make sense when using an open router model. But I haven’t used extensions that much yet, so who knows what features I’m overlooking. I don’t see myself dropping CC for now though.
Isn't plan mode just a "make a plan first, don't change anything yet" addendum to your prompt? Haven't tried Pi, but given it's famous extensibility, that should not be too hard to build.
If you really want a “plan mode” you can ask Pi to add it. This is the strength of Pi. It isn’t opinionated far past excellent execution.
Anything extra you can add yourself. You just ask whatever model you’re using to query the documentation included in the pi application and then its away.
I switched to Pi and it was great but I had to switch back to Claude Code purely for the subscription. Even with all the token efficiency I built into Pi it just wasn't nearly as good value as an Anthropic subscription. All open models ended up being more expensive so I switched to using an OpenAI subscription, which was better, but the OpenAI subscription is way less generous AND their models are behind. It became hard to justify.
I switch harnesses regularly depending on the model providers, and I only use skills which are universally usable in any model and harness combination. I don't want to get tied to a particular model or harness, and skills provide me the freedom to do so.
I can include any custom programs I need in a skill, and the SKILL.md file is just a doc of how to use those. It helps me save tokens and ensures determinism with repeated workflows since redoing a task is just calling a skill's program.
I also load only skills that are necessary for a project. I don't want to pollute the context window with unneeded skills.
You can write your own compaction function for Pi, and you can even have different, domain specific compaction logic if you want. The default one is dumb, I agree.
I've been using claude-bridge [0] and pi-vcc [1] for compaction and it has been a complete life changer. I'm slowly phasing out my Anthropic use for Mistral but I've used it for months without issues.
Most harnesses are not designed with conversations to be append-only from the start, which causes us all endless pain when caching is concerned.
When making a harness, it is so, so easy to do the "web thing" and have your system prompt be a template where you dynamically inject variables like the current date or the contents of the current working directory, and then just re-render that template on every request. THis is a bad, doubleplusungood, terrible, awful idea, and you should never do this under any circumstances. Anthropic will soon force you not to by literally refusing conversations that "break continuity" in this way and do anything but append new user messages at the end, but other providers at least appear to work.
I agree. They are probably solving problems we don’t know are problems, beyond UX (like caching). That’s one of the reasons I prefer CC over Pi. Codex is pretty nice too, with respect to UX.
I’ve been using Pi since April. I switched from using copilot CLI which definitely isn’t the most frontier harness going but was more “feature rich” at the time than the stripped down feature set you get with Pi out the box.
The bit I was instantly drawn to was how much access you are given to change every part of it. Its similar to the text buffer in emacs where every cell in the buffer is fully accessible to any edits you need to make. My configurations are fairly minimal, but for instance I match the accept cli calls that could be destructive and edits to files in the same way copilot is set up.
Currently my pi config turns it into a tutor. It no longer makes edits, just advises and is designed to teach. I make all the code edits by hand. Use deepseek flash with it because its stupid cheap. It works for me, but honestly you can set up pi in any way you want which is why I personally think its the best harness by virtue of anything being possible as long as you can dream it up!
Could you share your setup? is it skill-based? I like the idea of using the model as a tutor/pair programmer so that I stay more grounded rather than delegating too much of the coding to it.
I was struggeling with multiple markdown files, not only for multiple Claude sessions, but also Copilot and Codex, accross different machines and projects with diferent purposes.
The problem: This is not only about some pre-prompt instructions, its about coding instructions for different lanugages, frameworks and architectures and skill/hooks/tools for different purposes. I drowned in multiple setups (I have ADHD/ASS, I start two projects a week). So I decided to built this kind of "wrapper" that I can use with every new project. It allows me to maintain a global setup of "defaults" and then add modules to each project as I need them.
It's not fully done now, but it already helps me. Someone else might find it useful.
Build your own(1.) on top of Pi has worked for me so far. You end up with something that fulfills your personal requirements and suits your workflows. I ended up with a web based ui, multi-session, simple sandboxing to reduce the “oops” factor. It has been a good experience so far. Web seemed like a decent compromise and a working pwa + vpn to access the ui has changed how i work with LLMs - more like a whatsapp chat than a true coding session. Image support has been the biggest fame changer; ask the llm to screenshot and show things makes a huge difference.
I've been using Cursor for a few years now, and while I'm well aware that it's more expensive, from a UX perspective I am 95% happy. There's still a few things like not being able to move conversations between folders or computers, but big picture, a lot to love. It's just a really coherent dev experience.
When I read what folks write about CC and TUIs it all sounds... really, really awful and I kind of don't get why any wouldn't want to use Cursor. I'm posting this to see if anyone wants to explain how/why I might want to ditch Cursor and go all in on Claude or Codex or Pi or anything else. I'm open to being convinced!
Mostly, I just want to understand. My sense of CC is that it's great for folks who are looking to spend lots of money having 4 agents one-shot an entire application from a single prompt so that they can pick their favourite when they wake up. Is that an absurd perspective? If so, tell me how you use it.
I'm someone working on fairly significant but personal projects; I have a very clear picture in my head about what I'd like to get so I tend to write extremely dense, detail-filled prompts and go through a multi-revision planning phase before kicking off agent mode on a feature. The apps I build tend to be the result of several dozen or several hundred features developed mostly serially, and I am always the bottleneck because of that whole "knowing what I want" thing.
So, that's my usage pattern. Should I be using Claude (or Pi)?
Pi is without contest the best harness. Because it’s yours, the total control is the only way to move from driving agents to orchestrating them.
My interruptions and frustration with llms has gone down a cliff. It’s amazing to see what just a few lines of system prompt really can do to keep agents doing the correct thing much more often.
Second this, I went from Claude code fighting me all the time and being insanely opaque with its internals to Pi with detailed telemetry about what my agents are actually spending time on. My entire harness is completely custom, and works exactly the way I want it to. Absolutely love Pi
> Pi is without contest the best harness. Because it’s yours
You can do this with any harness. I really dislike the Node.js ecosystem and avoid Pi and the like. I started with another one written in Go that has all the basics and I can extend it in minutes for anything I need while keeping track of upstream.
OpenCode is a worse design in several ways. But the worst part is they don't really respond to issues or pull requests and support is nonexistent. Been in multiple issues with a dozen people begging for a fix with no response. So we all do what we can but there's no one community fix. A ton of OpenCode functionality gets broken constantly because they have almost nonexistent regression tests nor e2e tests for all the features. When they do break it you have to go to Discord and hope someone from their team sees that they broke something, and hope they want to fix it or take a PR for it. This is also ignoring the massive memory leaks that were just accepted as normal.
But with Pi being barebones and intended to be customized, there are a million extensions to choose from compared to OpenCode. This means not only can you write your own extension easily, 5 other people already have. I forked one popular question-asking tool and added support for an external ui (Zenity). And an LLM provider (Synthetic) had a bug which I helped get fixed in a 3rd party extension for the provider. Both I got done in days, because I didn't have to go through some official Pi team; extensions distribute the work better. It's still hard to manage all the extensions, but better than the alternative.
Why would you not ask opencode to fix the issue for you instead of asking opencode folks to ask their opencode to fix it for you? Surely Maintaining your own fork is just one markdown file and one corn task away.
With minimal work, you can get DSH web to be exposed to your internet behind Cloudflare Access (or similar) and have a harness running on your computer at home from any browser, including your phone's.
> it’s yours, the total control is the only way to move from driving agents to orchestrating them
I wrote Juggler (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler) because I liked Pi's approach to everything being customisable and controllable, but I wanted a slick, navigable GUI rather than terminal hell.
...BUT: having gone to great pains to build an architecture around customisation, where every possible pluggable thing is a plugin, I'm starting to feel jaded on the whole "we need to customise it all" mentality. The models have got so good over the last year that I just don't think that tweaking the harness is something many people will need to do as things progress. The models only need a bare-bones set of tools to do everything they need, and I'm starting to think that UX and UI are the only really important things to focus on in an agent.
(Although from the perspective of coding a harness, making things plugins and having a plugin API does help to keep things clean and stops the codebase getting sloppy)
I built a Claude Code mod that displays a dashboard linking issues/PRs to claude sessions and allowing me to organize my work more around activities, such as reviewing, working on issues, fixing PRs, developing specs and ad hoc sessions.
As someone coming from a vim in tmux, keyboard only workflow, this works most naturally for me without needing to break out of the terminal.
Also it's nice that it is a self referential setup that can be easily developed and enhanced right while working on things in Claude Code.
I'm sure many of you are building similar personalized setups.
The author is complaining about Claude Code inside VSCode. The complaints don’t apply to the Claude Desktop App, for the most part. You don’t need VSCode to review code, just use the Claude app which has good support already.
And if you’re moving to Pi, maybe use it with ThinkRail, from JetBrains. It’s my favorite harness since it can do everything I want: multiple models including local, focus on reviewing code after the agents are done, uses worktrees by default. And it adds some nifty tools for designing software which I am really enjoying. One thing it can’t do is let you edit files :) but that is ok, in the rare case I write something I use emacs, thank God no more need for a heavy IDE!
This is interesting, I've been using claude for work stuff because they pay the $200 subscripion but at home I've been using pi with glm-5.3-flash and now deepseekv4.1-flash.
When I'm doing work stuff I'm really not liking claude and only using it because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses. If work would give me a $20 ollama cloud subscription in place of the $200 claude one I would be much more happy at work, that's how much I dislike it.
I used a claude subscription with omp for 6 months earlier this year, before switching to chatGPT which Im also using with it. Claude even has a splash screen on their login page saying logged in with oh-my-pi so I very much doubt they are trying to ban people for using other harnesses.
I don't think this is true. They never went through with this change. If you use the SDK it appears ToS compliant. You just can't sell it or distribute it, hence why pi doesn't support it.
I use Requesty to get access to models from all providers, including Anthropic. It is pretty cheap and competitive with others for the quality. haiku 5.5 is one of the cheapest available, cheaper than Qwen while being superior in the price range (less than 10 cents per million tokens).
I put 10 dollars to use on my hobby projects and I still have more than half after a couple of weeks. Using bigger models is dramatically more expensive, of course.
I've been daily driving Pi for over a month now and never looking back. The latest crop of frontier models have really complex bash calls, so I've written an extension that rewrites them into plain English while still making them easy to reveal in full, unlike some harnesses which seem to try to hide this from the user which is pretty irresponsible IMO.[0]
Try and get on the early access waitlist for Rex, really nice terminal + multiplexer. Ghostty replaced iterm for me and my team, then Rex which uses libghostty was a great level up further.
Claude told me that Anthropic disallows Pi for use with Claude Pro / Max subscription and you have to use API. Is OP then switching to API and credits?
Is using Codex through Pi allowed? I've been a Claude user, but a lot of the things mentioned bother me as well. I see it constantly make mistakes due to (simple) shell aliases, etc..
Not sure I'll actually switch but I'm curious. I've thought about trying to build my own harness and use Codex usage to work through it without spending a fortune on credits.
Yes, you can use your Codex subscription with Pi without any limitations. It supports Codex out of the box. You may need to install extensions for things like tracking usage and limit resets though. Pi only provides basic Codex integration.
Anthropic's subscription is the one that has historically been tough to use with other harnesses, where they have (had?) technical safeguards to ensure your subscription usage was limited to Claude Code CLI, with third party harnesses often implementing workarounds or faking it to use your Claude.ai subscription. Nowadays Jetbrains Air does officially allow using your Claude.ai subscription.
But OpenAI's subscription has seemingly always been available to use in other harnesses without trouble.
Using your subscription in 3rd party tools is explicitly allowed for Codex, and disallowed but not really enforced for Claude. There are extensions for Pi that allow you to log in with your Claude credentials, Codex is iirc even built-in.
There is no stick unlike Anthropic (along with insisting on signing commits and "don't abuse the robot" the reason I started to use OpenAI instead of Anthropic --- not that I am under the illusion they are any less evil overall) but I think now there is starting to be a carrot towards Codex usage since there sessions are "cached forever". I assume if you use Pi you get 12 hours of cache instead.
Does Pi come with an auto mode that blocks dangerous actions? It didn't last time I checked, and these measures are critical to protect prod (and your personal files, etc) from a confused agent.
I gave the harness a try and it is refreshing, but the insistence on staying bare bones and not implementing basic functionality natively, together with no vetting process for popular 3rd party modules, made me return to Claude Code.
gotgenes/pi-permission-system and the ai-guard authorizer can do a lot here, it feels very similar to cc auto mode.
I built a policy authorizer on top of pi-permission-system that looks kinda like nftables that models commands/subcommands/options as read/write and enfores policies depending on if the sub agent is read only or write, which really cuts down on the stupid decisions and nicely complements AI cmd review. Pi shines for making things like that possible.
Well yeah, the whole point of pi is that you build it to your workflow. If you dislike the entire point of a project, it’s not for you. I run my agents in a sandbox. When Claude or Codex then double sandbox themselves, it gets really annoying.
Wrap your agent of choice in e.g. docker sandbox, nono.sh, Nvidia OpenShell, microsanbox or any other sandboxing tool and run it without any checks (i.e. "yolo mode", dangerously-skip-permissions etc.)
IMHO it makes the whole category of problems around permission fatigue, trusting the harness (or plugin) authors etc go away.
I did that. Customized Pi to run in Bubblewrap, made an action authorization flow, etc. But that's throwing the baby with the bathwater. This gives you a harmless, less capable agent. To get both safety and usefulness, Ant's solution of a fast classifier works really well.
I use https://pi.dev/packages/pi-warden with Jev (but can use other Decisions API), it would make sense to combine with pi-permission-system to get the CC two stage "default auto" mode.
> having a ton of CLAUDE.md files scattered about various GitHub hobby repos is great guerrilla marketing
Their real marketing comes/came from https://github.com/claude phenomenon. Irrespective of what underlying model you are using the claude code harness just sticks this github user as git commit author and then you have to make an effort to remove it. That is just odd.
My biggest claude code problem is that it calls git status with fsmonitor turned off via env variables and command line argument and I work on a super big repository.
I'm spawning a lot of agents to work in parallel. I guess I should just use the API, but it just shows that it does some random stuff you might not agree with. 99% of the users are ok with it because they don't have a 10gb repository
I am a CC user on the 20x, 5x is too small for me. Doing some quick maths I found that the Anthropic subscription it is a bargain compared to other models on API usage.
Does using Pi saves you so much token overhead that my maths are wrong?
There are some extensions you can use to use your claude subscription on Pi, it runs Claude Code under the hood but with pi's prompts. The same is possible with Opencode
I am using pi as the minimal coding agent for pc administration, incl. coding up scripts/daemons that help my infrastructure (automatically updating dns when my ISP changes my IP, automating letsencrypt wildcard cert updates and similar stuff). Tested continue.dev, aider, pi, kilocode and opencode for large projects and stuck with opencode for now. I am not fully happy though and hope something better comes along in time. It is just that the annoyances I have with it are not too problematic, I can cope. For some time I also worked with a custom harness I built on top of pi, but that wasn't great either.
Pi has been my goto agent for several months now, the project is great and basically runs everywhere. If you like Pi, I suggest taking a look at Deepseek Harness too.
For those using Claude, there's pi-claude-code[0] which is currently still the way to use Ant subs in Pi.
Update October 7, 2026: Claude Max, Ultra, and Team plans now include monthly API credits. They cover the Claude API, Claude Managed Agents, and the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p when you run them with an API key from your linked Claude Console organization. Nothing changes for your plan: when you’re signed in with your Claude plan, the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p still draw from your subscription limits.
EDIT: I was mistaken. pi uses @anthropic-ai/sdk (the client for the Messages API), not @anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk (the Agent SDK).
The Agent SDK is using the Claude Code harness. The point of using Pi is to avoid using that harness entirely. It wouldn’t make sense to use the Agent SDK in Pi; you would essentially be driving a harness with another harness.
If you’ve used Codex before, then the Agent SDK is Anthropic’s equivalent of the Codex App Server, which is Codex running headlessly with a protocol to talk to it.
Model capability is what harnesses expose, I have experimented with pi using local mlx models - several 27/35B quantisations (Gemma, Qwen, Flint) and the reality is that they are much weaker than Sonnet, let alone Opus. Of course they are "free" (if you have a $3000 mac) but they are slow and dumb, useful for very routine things but comparatively bad at problem solving and trouble shooting.
I am genuinely curious to know what kind of genuine problems people are solving with opus that cant be done with sonnet or the free models.
If there are problems that people are working on that only opus 5.5 can solve then were we not touching such problems last year at all (because last years best model was inferior to sonnet 5.5).
And if people are solving such problems now, why cant I see any meaningful improvement in even a single software I use everyday?
Not trying to diss on anything or anybody. I want to know.
I took a few months out and it’s noticeable quite how much better opus is at least in respect of the quality of understanding. It’s a step change for me.
> Someone at Anthropic must’ve caught wind… just a day after making my decision, they announced Claude Code would finally start supporting AGENTS.md files in an effort to get me to stay.
Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous?
>> Someone at Anthropic must’ve caught wind… just a day after making my decision, they announced Claude Code would finally start supporting AGENTS.md files in an effort to get me to stay.
> Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous?
I think that was tongue in cheek. And by that I don't mean the author's tongue was actually in his cheek.
I also think it went over your head. And by that I don't mean I think it literally went over your head.
It's clearly a joke, but I can forgive some people for taking it literally, given the impact that certain well-known devs have on other companies' decision-making. It's a common enough line that it's plausible this could have been a VIP whose opinions swayed a company. Not him and not Anthropic, of course, but it does happen.
While I agree the sarcasm is obvious, important to remember sarcasm doesnt really translate well if english is not your first language, and notoriously does not translate well online regardless, see:
It’s not that unreasonable, or at least wasn’t a few years ago. I complained about the Chatgpt Pro $200 not allowing basically unlimited image generation (the limits were super low) a couple years ago and the next day Sam Altman tweeted asking about switching up how they handle Pro plans and putting usage into a single pool (which is what they moved to). If he didn’t read my email directly the gist at least got to him.
Alternatively, what you’re seeing is continuous hill climbing and optimisations based on large scale experiments and simulated rollouts.
For me personally, I don’t use Claude Code because I can’t read the source.
At least with Codex, I know there’s a bunch of telemetry and all that, but I can have my agent inspect the source and have relatively greater confidence it’s not implanting spyware onto my machine, because a classifier thinks I’m working for Deepseek or something.
I think Anthropic is working on allowing AGENTS.md files as well. However, Claude.md files take precedence if present. If not, you fall back to AGENTS.md.
I have tried Pi, but at this point I'm using a fleet of hermes agents to connect realtime via webrtc to a custom web dashboard (written in rust) that works on multiple projects/tasks atomically and simultaneously and compiles/tests locally and then submits to a private central git with all its changes and then pushes to dev for testing, then prod. The agents working on tasks can request new tasks and a supervisor is configured for each project that does a scheduled review and proposes recommendations based on what has been done and needs to be done based on the project plan...As new agents come online they can be quickly enrolled. It works well when you're working on many projects simultaneously. Its also a good use for a stack of 10 old laptops.
Damn I built almost the exact same thing lol, down the supervisor for each project and web kanban board thing. I use fly.io sprites for the compute which has been cool to experiment with.
Cannot show now because Github times out for me, again.
I had pi write me a ralph loop plugin. You plan with it, it breaks it down into tasks. Task success means clearing the context - if it runs out of context, it clears and starts on the same task again (code changes from previous run are left intact).
Complete with little docker-like names for Ralph sessions and the ability to resume sessions should you need to.
Point is, I would generally do this because it costs less context I think, and better tracks progress.
Ping me if you are interested and want it. Otherwise, plenty around :)
Something is misconfigured on your end.
I have had some trouble where parameters were incorrect, but otherwise I have used several vendors (local, openrouter, ollama cloud, kimi, deep seek) and it generally works.
Most likely context length parameters aren’t set quite right for your model/provider and you genuinely run out of context during compaction
The whole AGENTS vs CLAUDE md issue was bound to be resolved. If the models are getting smarter and harnesses getting better - how could you have a product so dumb that it ignores whatever skills, instructions, references, other things that are part of the folder context it is mounted in.
Having claude code ignore agents.md just made it seem dumb. At this point, you probably don't need either.
> It seems like there isn’t someone high-up whose job is strictly to say “no” to these requests, which is incredibly important when it comes to product engineering
Ah, product management - we know so few of ye who know what you're doing.
Man, my M1 Pro unfortunately only has 16GB of RAM; it has been such a limiter to using local models. I'll give kapitsa a try, I see I should be able to squeeze some smaller models on
Anecdotally I run semi nightly harness and local model test runs, and opencode consistently outperforms ohmypi on various code bench tasks.
Note though that this for local models that can run on a 5090, so, kinda dumb models with a small context window. Also they might perform differently on a custom pi setup rather than the very feature rich ohmypi.
Mostly the runs just cause me to get decision fatigue so I typically just use opencode and let a frontier model choose whatever cheaper models it wants to orchestrate with, so long as it's one that's not on the same token budget.
P.S. I'd always wondered who it was that got caleb.software before I could... Outshot in a western duel!
When you say "kinda dumb" it's worth noting that the smaller coding models tend not to actually need system prompts to be helpful coding assistants, etc. Qwen maybe more than Muse Glimmer? I've not tested Qwen 3.8 27B enough yet. Even Gemma 4 didn't seem to need much.
Muse Glimmer is so absolutely tuned for one particular pattern (turn-by-turn agentic coding and assistance) that it will do it more or less without a prompt at all (except to set the reasoning level maybe). Beyond the tools announcement, it feels to me like it almost only needs a prompt to do plan mode stuff. If LM Studio (in either of its forms) or Unsloth Desktop had proper support for running inside a linux container rather than just a filesystem sandbox, you'd barely need a dedicated coding agent at all. Osaurus gets even closer.
I wanted to like Opencode but I can't, really. I am enjoying Pi slightly more because it's just way less convoluted and obscure.
FWIW I use Paseo for the GUI, which to some extent eliminates that aspect of decision fatigue; if you like Paseo's UI well enough, you can have it with almost any harness. And since it can connect to its daemon via ssh you can still have the desktop GUI with a container. (Not clear to me if Opencode v2 Desktop makes remote connections to the daemon or just wraps the web interface like v1 did)
I do not know how it is with Glimmer, but other Facebook models (Muse and whatever is currently hiding under "Crouton") sure love ignoring direct instructions to do or not do something important (like not using particular broken/inefficient tools). Doesn't matter if it's repeated ten times in screaming caps, they'll still ignore it at least sometimes.
But this feels like six weeks (or more) out-of-date. And so it is - from mid-September. And I know that observing such a thing sounds bizarre and teenage, but that's kind of a long time right now; we're at a moment in history when things are moving fast.
We're not really fully ready for the traffic TBH, but for those who few of you choose to click, this is what we've been doing with pi lately:
I used to use ChatGPT/Claude in the TUI up until like 3 months ago, but my usage of LLMs has exploded - many sessions across many projects. I feel like I outgrew the TUI and now I'm using ChatGPT/Claude desktop. VS Code has become a code review tool and place where I manage git if need be.
The GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, which makes history easier and cleaner to scroll through, also no scrolling bugs, rich text is easier to read with tables, and images integrated into the chat, resources like browsers in the context of the session. Drag and drop session organization (pins), scheduled tasks, etc.. all that in the side bar.
Usually a TUI would be open in VS Code and scoped to whatever repo I'm working with so 10 projects, 10 VS Code instances open, not super scalable. With the GUI desktop app it's one app, and I can start sessions in an repo and switch between them easily, no need to open VS Code for each. I don't see what could make me want to go back to using a TUI.
Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?
I just ended up making my own GUI. I never really liked any of the pre-build ones. It started slow (3-4 days of work) and grew organically around my working style. I can also have my preferred UX (e.g., high information density).
Take a look at the Codex App Server or the Claude Agent SDK as a way to communicate with harnesses running headlessly and build your own UI on top. I’m sure Pi can be set up in a similar fashion.
I've been building my own open-source coding agent, VT Code, in Rust.
I wanted more control over the harness itself, especially tool execution, sandboxing, approvals, and context management.
Recently built a native macOS app with GPUI on top of the same agent runloop. It's been interesting exploring how the same engine works across terminal and desktop workflows.
https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode
I did this for myself several times. I started with winforms and evolved into a full blown clone of ChatGPT.com experience built as a razor/MVC project in .NET10.
I have 2 versions that are just for working on unity projects. One that is for working on the client project. There is also one that I refer to as the ring of power / Death Star that I keep mostly to myself. Eventually, the client saw what I was doing and decided they wanted a custom ChatGPT.com experience for the whole team, so I got paid to build the most recent one.
Using AI to assist with the development of this stuff is the RSI you've been looking for. I'm in a situation where I was only able to solve a problem due to two levels of bootstrapping enabled by custom harnesses. The product the client uses cannot be "one shot" using the latest frontier tools. I had to build an ad-hoc agent loop fit for just that one purpose using another tool that was possible to build via copilot. For example, using copilot in VS over a unity project's scripts might as well be a drunk person throwing darts from a boat compared to a purpose built harness that can execute ad-hoc scripts in the editor environment as often as it pleases.
The client's custom experience is better than ChatGPT.com in many important ways now. It certainly performs better. It will run on safari without doing horrific things to layout and my CPU. You can easily exceed the capabilities of the frontier AI companies in ways that are important if you use their tools cleverly. These companies are great at making AI models. Not harnesses, websites, apps, etc.
I have the same setup. All you need is a server hosted on your own machine and a few adapters to connect them to providers using ACP and various thin client all connected through tailnet. I have developed my own web and mobile applications with gemini live full duplex routing to opus my local projects and maintain the same session across any platform I choose, including Hermes. Building personal software is easy these days.
I thought the TUI was the ultimate power tool and loved the original embrace from claude code. I still use TUI a lot, but have been using deepseek harness web app atop my local model and am already liking the better organization and UI of this interface. I can see my load shifting to it. But you are right, you almost always need a VS Code interface open as well.
The outputs of Opus 5.5 were so much easier to read, but I do find the the deepseek web based tool much easier to comprehend for some reason. Plus I can access it from phone (over tailscale) as well when out and about and continue sessions very easily. AND it is all open source/weights. I'm pretty thrilled, but it's been less than a week.
claude is a terminal-themed gui, not a tui.
People seem to forge Claude has a very powerful GUI as well. I don’t get why most still seem to be using it in the terminal instead. A bit like emacs. The GUI is infinitely superior to use!
I think this was a marketing play by ANthropic.
Look, it's just a tool, you are a developer, you've used TUIs all your career, this is just one more TUI, no different than your beloved Vim or Emacs. No need to be scared, this won't replace you because mere mortals won't know what to do with a TUI, so you can use it freely and get more work done, just as you were always obsessed with doing when configuring your Vim bindings.
Then, a year in, when everybody is hooked line and sinker, people start to understand that the TUI is the least important part of the whole thing, and the model and harness are what really matters.
Claude Web app includes Claude code tab with remote option to work from your own machine (if preferred). I am using it very often.
I have a project folder which is my default environment, and within it I have my many repo clones. That way I can work on any project from my prompt and reference elements in one project to include in another.
I continue to get good results using lifeOS (though I don't use the entire setup) https://github.com/danielmiessler/LifeOS
I've lost faith in the ChatGPT desktop app. It's nicer than managing a bunch of TUI sessions, but it's so prone to losing session history / context.
The MacOS one has a dreadful startup time as well. I can have the website open in ms but the app takes 7 or 8 seconds
Herdr changed my tui game. Pi but for tmux.
Yea me too. I also wnet GUI for a little bit until I discovered herdr.
I’m using one iTerm to host the TUIs. The RAM cost is a tiny fraction of modern electron-based gui slop
I dislike the harness TUIs for this for the same reasons. Nothing against TUI in general, the lazy* universe for example is great.
OpenChamber (the desktop app, not the VSC extension) for OpenCode currently works best for me. Especially because of its seamless remote control via their iOS app.
""GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, ""
? The GUI has nothing to do with that.
If you use Chat / Work / Code <- that's the differentiation.
So 'Code' in 'Gui' is identical to Claude Code except for the visual layout.
If you use Work or Chat, which are not optimized for Coding you'll see a different experience.
If you use iTerm or Ghostty and set a key combo to switch tabs you can very easily switch between tabs and the TUI generally gives more dense information.
Usually people migrate to TUI not the other way around.
I think that there are reasons to use GUI - if there is deeper integration with Git or an issue tracker - or - in VSCode - for navigating files etc. - definitely those things are valid.
But for raw AI the getting a TUI to work the way you want it is ideal.
I don't get why people love TUIs so much. They're basically GUIs made using inferior tools. Why hammer in a nail using your fist if you have a hammer handy?
A GUI is strictly more powerful than a TUI (because a GUI could just show plain text in cases where that is the most appropriate mode of interaction, E.G. Bloomberg, AMadeus), but it could also do so much more in cases where it is not.
I do love terminals, don't get me wrong. When what you're interacting with is CLIs and Unix tools in a shell, a terminal is exactly what you want. I do love the Unix philosophy, I like small and composable tools that you can use together, and I think the interactive way of working that a shell or REPL can give you is great (though notebooks would have been better, but that's beside the point). Those are things that the terminal shines at. Pretending to be a GUI is not one of those things.
A couple of reasons
1. Lower resource consumption (ram, binary size)
2. Usable over the network (ssh)
3. Often much easier to drive with automation software (agents/scripts)
4. Ui tends to be dense, matches your font perferences
Are you saying I should go back to GUI? I just feel it’s so awkward. I have LazyVim for more advanced review, Hunk, etc… the GUI is like a inferior version of Eclipse IDE or something. Or it used to be, atleast.
It's because you can ssh into something and VNC sucks.
GUIs are great when you're sitting in front of the computer it's running on. Trying to do anything remotely with them is terrible. RDP is pretty great at making that experience suck less tho.
One benefit is that they're easy to use remotely over SSH or in a VM, but I agree that a local, native GUI is generally better than a TUI.
Personally the Claude Code TUI also sucked every time i used it. Scrollback bugs in IDEA embedded shells, extraneous output vs the VSCode extension, and unreliable links to source code.
Isn't the CC TUI written in React?? I mean my web dev "all i have is this hammer" brain is intrigued, but surely, there's better things to do? Like you said, the terminal is great for piping inputs and outputs, for scripting, for bulk operations. It's really not great for real time interaction across many files, which is how i use CC and kind of wonder how you would use it any other way. (I guess if you literally just prompt and pray, the UI literally doesn't matter?)
Terminals are 'activity dense' and usually have a lot of key cusotmizations.
You can't even have 'tabs' inside of Claude Desktop, which is a dealbreaker for most power users.
I went the same way but found that the GUIs (Claude and Codex Desktop) are still too low-level to scale well. They are basically just tabbed chat windows. I wanted more structure and more targeted UX for managing my work. It's easy nowadays to build your own GUI, so I did.
(I found it's still quite some work to polish it so that it's actually good. Therefore, sharing it could still benefit others, so I did: obeya.si, free, open-source)
> Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?
I generally prefer GUIs but I'm OK with a TUI harness. Anyway, there's a web frontend for Pi (https://github.com/agegr/pi-web) which looks very promising although it still has some rough edges. They even have an interactive demo: https://agegr.github.io/pi-web/
I'm not associated with the project.
I went from TUI and tested several GUIs that can also support a "TUI" view.
After testing several options at the moment I'm using Orca IDE as my daily driver - effectively as a layer on top anthropic / openai
- Supports both anthropic and openai with subscriptions and can you swithc easily between those two + other LLms
- Its a bit hidden / non intuitive to setup but it does support running everything on remove host -> I run (95%) of my jobs on remote hosts that I can both access from my laptop + their native app via a wirguard vpn
- You can switch between chatview + TUI on the same conversation - very useful if you move e.g. from desktop session to mobile view.
- For repeating LLM tasks Orca also suports a kind of scheduler - but I prefer currently to have the agent set things up via chronjobs on the remote machine (not super happy with this ...)
Key reason I dont want to go fully ChatGPT/Claude is also I dont want to build a super strong dependency on those mega players and remain the ability to switch to other interefernce providers / models.
As LLM usage is already a core workflow in our company - a sudden unavailability of one or a massive price increase - makes it absolutely necessary to build out alternatives.
We all know the downsides of SAAS Lock in too well from the 2010s. In that sense Fool me once, fool me twice..
I switched to the GUIs half a year ago and never looked back.
From the text rendering and scrolling alone, they are much more pleasant to work with.
Conversations with activity and MR status indicators, nested sessions, images in the chat, and generally more information and functionality on the screen.
One negative is that it gives Claude, and particularly Codex, room to mess up with auto-opening artifacts.
Codex, when I was still using it, kept opening report or comparison pages in fullscreen when I did not ask for artifacts.
Claude loves to open its iOS simulator pane, but somehow never displays the one it's actually using, instead showing a simulator that is idle. It might be related to my custom tooling.
No idea what you're working on, but if it's anything involving sifting a lot of data, how do you know if your code actually works or does what Claude says it's doing?
Some of it is the historical snobbery that CLI users have for GUI users. I count myself among them. Isn't it way cooler how I can fix my NIC with just three chained bash commands, while the windows users have to navigate 8 levels of dialogues?
But that mentality doesn't leave room for a lot of nuance. Even the most hard core TUI proponents and neovim gurus probably do not use Lynx as their browser (well maybe they use a vibe coded hacker news TUI client instead)
I was confused until you mentioned you were running it in VS Code. That issue goes away if you run it in a standalone terminal with tmux or tabs.
Pi is a good harness (I finally gave it a try w/ abliterated GLM), but not with Anthropic subscription, and there are multiple reasons to avoid alternative harnesses with their models in general (imho):
1. Potential ban due to ToS violation;
2. It doesn't follow all Anthropic's communication mechanisms out-of-the-box, they heavily use custom headers, hidden flags, and undocumented API features that affect models' behavior;
3. Compact is better in CC (significantly);
4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);
5. It's almost unavoidable to use Pi's extensions, and I wouldn't trust my oauth token to anything third-party (take a look at regular reddit/X posts where people getting banned due to such leaks and abuse) -> it takes enormous amount of hacking on top of Pi to get closer to CC abilities.
CC has hooks and mods, even ui_* (undocumented) protocol if you need some big customization, those are enough to implement whatever you want on top of CC.
Also, I'm working with CC from the very first versions, as for me - it's the best harness (as-is) on the market. I have zero clue what problems people are talking about (except known big issues, 3-4 over the years, I've never had serious problems, at all). Seamless and smooth experience, optimized for Anthropic models.
P.S. You can consider this as Stockholm syndrome effect, but... you have close to zero chances to get unbanned with Anthropic, and it's the best coding model(s) available today.
> 4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);
I'd be curious to know the background around this. At work, I've used @anthropic/Opus 5.5 through Portkey with Pi, and ended up with $10 within less than 10 message exchanges, on a fairly trivial topic. OTOH, when using Claude Code directly with Opus 5.5, I basically spent $30 for a good back-and-forth across a full chat, reaching the point where CC kicked off compaction.
I've only used CC and Pi and the point of pi is to use extensions. Luckily you can write them yourself pretty easily.
I cannot get behind CC is the best harness. Once u switched to pi I knew I was never going back and occasionally I need to use CC for my subscription and find it unpleasant. CC is just this incoherent hodge podge of functionality that seems to have no vision. Subjective, of course.
How much does pi cost you when you’re using 5.5 via API?
I feel like the max CC plans are incredible value.
Why would you use it via the API?
I personally don't use Pi but Zed, but Claude is plugged using ACP on my Pro plan. I would never pay the API prices that's way too expensive.
I use both but I’m fairly new to Pi. For now things that I notably miss in Pi are plan mode and subtasks. I was also a bit surprised that it doesn't have default permission mode (deny all) like CC. It’d make sense when using an open router model. But I haven’t used extensions that much yet, so who knows what features I’m overlooking. I don’t see myself dropping CC for now though.
Isn't plan mode just a "make a plan first, don't change anything yet" addendum to your prompt? Haven't tried Pi, but given it's famous extensibility, that should not be too hard to build.
If you really want a “plan mode” you can ask Pi to add it. This is the strength of Pi. It isn’t opinionated far past excellent execution.
Anything extra you can add yourself. You just ask whatever model you’re using to query the documentation included in the pi application and then its away.
I switched to Pi and it was great but I had to switch back to Claude Code purely for the subscription. Even with all the token efficiency I built into Pi it just wasn't nearly as good value as an Anthropic subscription. All open models ended up being more expensive so I switched to using an OpenAI subscription, which was better, but the OpenAI subscription is way less generous AND their models are behind. It became hard to justify.
I switch harnesses regularly depending on the model providers, and I only use skills which are universally usable in any model and harness combination. I don't want to get tied to a particular model or harness, and skills provide me the freedom to do so.
I can include any custom programs I need in a skill, and the SKILL.md file is just a doc of how to use those. It helps me save tokens and ensures determinism with repeated workflows since redoing a task is just calling a skill's program.
I also load only skills that are necessary for a project. I don't want to pollute the context window with unneeded skills.
> Luckily you can write them yourself pretty easily.
According to the article you can ask Pi to write ssuch extensions, so you don't have to, right?
6. A\ reduce model usage for non-CC client. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/97074
You can write your own compaction function for Pi, and you can even have different, domain specific compaction logic if you want. The default one is dumb, I agree.
I've been using claude-bridge [0] and pi-vcc [1] for compaction and it has been a complete life changer. I'm slowly phasing out my Anthropic use for Mistral but I've used it for months without issues.
[0]: https://pi.dev/packages/pi-claude-bridge?name=claude-bridge [1]: https://pi.dev/packages/@sting8k/pi-vcc?name=pi-vcc
Most harnesses are not designed with conversations to be append-only from the start, which causes us all endless pain when caching is concerned.
When making a harness, it is so, so easy to do the "web thing" and have your system prompt be a template where you dynamically inject variables like the current date or the contents of the current working directory, and then just re-render that template on every request. THis is a bad, doubleplusungood, terrible, awful idea, and you should never do this under any circumstances. Anthropic will soon force you not to by literally refusing conversations that "break continuity" in this way and do anything but append new user messages at the end, but other providers at least appear to work.
I agree. They are probably solving problems we don’t know are problems, beyond UX (like caching). That’s one of the reasons I prefer CC over Pi. Codex is pretty nice too, with respect to UX.
I’ve been using Pi since April. I switched from using copilot CLI which definitely isn’t the most frontier harness going but was more “feature rich” at the time than the stripped down feature set you get with Pi out the box.
The bit I was instantly drawn to was how much access you are given to change every part of it. Its similar to the text buffer in emacs where every cell in the buffer is fully accessible to any edits you need to make. My configurations are fairly minimal, but for instance I match the accept cli calls that could be destructive and edits to files in the same way copilot is set up.
Currently my pi config turns it into a tutor. It no longer makes edits, just advises and is designed to teach. I make all the code edits by hand. Use deepseek flash with it because its stupid cheap. It works for me, but honestly you can set up pi in any way you want which is why I personally think its the best harness by virtue of anything being possible as long as you can dream it up!
Could you share your setup? is it skill-based? I like the idea of using the model as a tutor/pair programmer so that I stay more grounded rather than delegating too much of the coding to it.
I built myself a tool because of the exact same reason:
https://github.com/nickyreinert/yaw/
I was struggeling with multiple markdown files, not only for multiple Claude sessions, but also Copilot and Codex, accross different machines and projects with diferent purposes.
The problem: This is not only about some pre-prompt instructions, its about coding instructions for different lanugages, frameworks and architectures and skill/hooks/tools for different purposes. I drowned in multiple setups (I have ADHD/ASS, I start two projects a week). So I decided to built this kind of "wrapper" that I can use with every new project. It allows me to maintain a global setup of "defaults" and then add modules to each project as I need them.
It's not fully done now, but it already helps me. Someone else might find it useful.
Build your own(1.) on top of Pi has worked for me so far. You end up with something that fulfills your personal requirements and suits your workflows. I ended up with a web based ui, multi-session, simple sandboxing to reduce the “oops” factor. It has been a good experience so far. Web seemed like a decent compromise and a working pwa + vpn to access the ui has changed how i work with LLMs - more like a whatsapp chat than a true coding session. Image support has been the biggest fame changer; ask the llm to screenshot and show things makes a huge difference.
1) vibecoded, “works for me” level of stability: https://github.com/randomcodemonkey/autere
I've been using Cursor for a few years now, and while I'm well aware that it's more expensive, from a UX perspective I am 95% happy. There's still a few things like not being able to move conversations between folders or computers, but big picture, a lot to love. It's just a really coherent dev experience.
When I read what folks write about CC and TUIs it all sounds... really, really awful and I kind of don't get why any wouldn't want to use Cursor. I'm posting this to see if anyone wants to explain how/why I might want to ditch Cursor and go all in on Claude or Codex or Pi or anything else. I'm open to being convinced!
Mostly, I just want to understand. My sense of CC is that it's great for folks who are looking to spend lots of money having 4 agents one-shot an entire application from a single prompt so that they can pick their favourite when they wake up. Is that an absurd perspective? If so, tell me how you use it.
I'm someone working on fairly significant but personal projects; I have a very clear picture in my head about what I'd like to get so I tend to write extremely dense, detail-filled prompts and go through a multi-revision planning phase before kicking off agent mode on a feature. The apps I build tend to be the result of several dozen or several hundred features developed mostly serially, and I am always the bottleneck because of that whole "knowing what I want" thing.
So, that's my usage pattern. Should I be using Claude (or Pi)?
Pi is without contest the best harness. Because it’s yours, the total control is the only way to move from driving agents to orchestrating them.
My interruptions and frustration with llms has gone down a cliff. It’s amazing to see what just a few lines of system prompt really can do to keep agents doing the correct thing much more often.
Second this, I went from Claude code fighting me all the time and being insanely opaque with its internals to Pi with detailed telemetry about what my agents are actually spending time on. My entire harness is completely custom, and works exactly the way I want it to. Absolutely love Pi
> Pi is without contest the best harness. Because it’s yours
You can do this with any harness. I really dislike the Node.js ecosystem and avoid Pi and the like. I started with another one written in Go that has all the basics and I can extend it in minutes for anything I need while keeping track of upstream.
Pi can run on Bun. I use it within ThinkRail which is an electronBun app! Pretty good speed and low enough memory usage. Highly recommended.
bun is just an alternative runner for the node ecosystem
I know but ElectronBun installs as a normal binary , you don’t need to install Node or Bun.
...it just bundles bun + the source files, it's no different from running a global bun binary.
Is OpenCode already passé? Especially with OpenChamber on top I don't see a reason to switch to PI.
OpenCode is a worse design in several ways. But the worst part is they don't really respond to issues or pull requests and support is nonexistent. Been in multiple issues with a dozen people begging for a fix with no response. So we all do what we can but there's no one community fix. A ton of OpenCode functionality gets broken constantly because they have almost nonexistent regression tests nor e2e tests for all the features. When they do break it you have to go to Discord and hope someone from their team sees that they broke something, and hope they want to fix it or take a PR for it. This is also ignoring the massive memory leaks that were just accepted as normal.
But with Pi being barebones and intended to be customized, there are a million extensions to choose from compared to OpenCode. This means not only can you write your own extension easily, 5 other people already have. I forked one popular question-asking tool and added support for an external ui (Zenity). And an LLM provider (Synthetic) had a bug which I helped get fixed in a 3rd party extension for the provider. Both I got done in days, because I didn't have to go through some official Pi team; extensions distribute the work better. It's still hard to manage all the extensions, but better than the alternative.
Why would you not ask opencode to fix the issue for you instead of asking opencode folks to ask their opencode to fix it for you? Surely Maintaining your own fork is just one markdown file and one corn task away.
>Pi is without contest the best harness.
There is contest.
https://frontierharness.org/
With minimal work, you can get DSH web to be exposed to your internet behind Cloudflare Access (or similar) and have a harness running on your computer at home from any browser, including your phone's.
> it’s yours, the total control is the only way to move from driving agents to orchestrating them
I wrote Juggler (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler) because I liked Pi's approach to everything being customisable and controllable, but I wanted a slick, navigable GUI rather than terminal hell.
...BUT: having gone to great pains to build an architecture around customisation, where every possible pluggable thing is a plugin, I'm starting to feel jaded on the whole "we need to customise it all" mentality. The models have got so good over the last year that I just don't think that tweaking the harness is something many people will need to do as things progress. The models only need a bare-bones set of tools to do everything they need, and I'm starting to think that UX and UI are the only really important things to focus on in an agent.
(Although from the perspective of coding a harness, making things plugins and having a plugin API does help to keep things clean and stops the codebase getting sloppy)
I built a Claude Code mod that displays a dashboard linking issues/PRs to claude sessions and allowing me to organize my work more around activities, such as reviewing, working on issues, fixing PRs, developing specs and ad hoc sessions. As someone coming from a vim in tmux, keyboard only workflow, this works most naturally for me without needing to break out of the terminal.
Also it's nice that it is a self referential setup that can be easily developed and enhanced right while working on things in Claude Code.
I'm sure many of you are building similar personalized setups.
Share it please I want to see
The author is complaining about Claude Code inside VSCode. The complaints don’t apply to the Claude Desktop App, for the most part. You don’t need VSCode to review code, just use the Claude app which has good support already. And if you’re moving to Pi, maybe use it with ThinkRail, from JetBrains. It’s my favorite harness since it can do everything I want: multiple models including local, focus on reviewing code after the agents are done, uses worktrees by default. And it adds some nifty tools for designing software which I am really enjoying. One thing it can’t do is let you edit files :) but that is ok, in the rare case I write something I use emacs, thank God no more need for a heavy IDE!
This is interesting, I've been using claude for work stuff because they pay the $200 subscripion but at home I've been using pi with glm-5.3-flash and now deepseekv4.1-flash.
When I'm doing work stuff I'm really not liking claude and only using it because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses. If work would give me a $20 ollama cloud subscription in place of the $200 claude one I would be much more happy at work, that's how much I dislike it.
> anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses
they do though?
edit: i guess the parent comment meant subscriptions specifically.
Can you expand on this? Is there a way to use Claude subscription but not their harness?
No but you can use bb or t3codes etc with it. Not perfect but allows orchestration between harnesses.
I don't use this myself but I believe they enabled Claude Code recently with explicit permission from Anthropic: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/58782#issuecommen...
Can I use my max subscription with Pi without Anthropic banning my account?
I used a claude subscription with omp for 6 months earlier this year, before switching to chatGPT which Im also using with it. Claude even has a splash screen on their login page saying logged in with oh-my-pi so I very much doubt they are trying to ban people for using other harnesses.
> it because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses.
You're not able to use the API credit and hook it up to another harness?
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/api-credits...
API credits yes, subscription no. And the subscription is much better value (per token).
You can PAYG. But it costs an arm and a leg, compared to the subscriptions. Why? Because they're propping up the "moat" that is Claude Code.
So you could make yourself much happier at work by paying the $20 yourself
> because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses
I don't think this is true. They never went through with this change. If you use the SDK it appears ToS compliant. You just can't sell it or distribute it, hence why pi doesn't support it.
You can use any harness with claude sub through llm reverse proxy
I use Requesty to get access to models from all providers, including Anthropic. It is pretty cheap and competitive with others for the quality. haiku 5.5 is one of the cheapest available, cheaper than Qwen while being superior in the price range (less than 10 cents per million tokens). I put 10 dollars to use on my hobby projects and I still have more than half after a couple of weeks. Using bigger models is dramatically more expensive, of course.
I've been daily driving Pi for over a month now and never looking back. The latest crop of frontier models have really complex bash calls, so I've written an extension that rewrites them into plain English while still making them easy to reveal in full, unlike some harnesses which seem to try to hide this from the user which is pretty irresponsible IMO.[0]
[0] https://github.com/siraben/pi-tool-summaries
I just have a hook that tells agents to echo what they're trying to do. Works fine.
alternatively, you could learn to read it
I just have custom instructions to tell the model to edit files using its tools rather than a gigantic bash pipelines. That's 80% of it.
Would that be useful in other harnesses/models like Codex? Wouldn't that lead to increased token usage?
As someone who spends a significant time in the terminal (iterm2), I just have Claude sessions open in tabs when I need it.
My setup is Pycharm, datagrip and iTerm2.
I run all the tests, debugging, linting in the terminal and use the jetbrains gui features which I find useful (some git management basically).
It works great, and this is for building large enterprises applications.
Try and get on the early access waitlist for Rex, really nice terminal + multiplexer. Ghostty replaced iterm for me and my team, then Rex which uses libghostty was a great level up further.
Claude told me that Anthropic disallows Pi for use with Claude Pro / Max subscription and you have to use API. Is OP then switching to API and credits?
Is using Codex through Pi allowed? I've been a Claude user, but a lot of the things mentioned bother me as well. I see it constantly make mistakes due to (simple) shell aliases, etc..
Not sure I'll actually switch but I'm curious. I've thought about trying to build my own harness and use Codex usage to work through it without spending a fortune on credits.
Yes, it is allowed and supported normally by pi and others.
Yes, you can use your Codex subscription with Pi without any limitations. It supports Codex out of the box. You may need to install extensions for things like tracking usage and limit resets though. Pi only provides basic Codex integration.
Yes. You can and it's easy to test. I'd also encourage you to try local models with it as well.
Pi/opencode apparently make 10% already of all traffic already:
https://manifest.build/blog/chatgpt-plus-tokens-third-party-...
Anthropic's subscription is the one that has historically been tough to use with other harnesses, where they have (had?) technical safeguards to ensure your subscription usage was limited to Claude Code CLI, with third party harnesses often implementing workarounds or faking it to use your Claude.ai subscription. Nowadays Jetbrains Air does officially allow using your Claude.ai subscription.
But OpenAI's subscription has seemingly always been available to use in other harnesses without trouble.
Yes and no. Any harness can use the subscription but must go through `claude -p` mode, which is more limited.
Why do you need to use claude to use a codex subscription with pi?
He assumed the original commenter meant claude, because Anthropic's the only provider that imposes the strict limitations on subscription use.
This, IMO, is one big selling point of Codex for me. The are much more accepting of usage outside of the Codex harness, and make it trivial to set up.
Using your subscription in 3rd party tools is explicitly allowed for Codex, and disallowed but not really enforced for Claude. There are extensions for Pi that allow you to log in with your Claude credentials, Codex is iirc even built-in.
There is no stick unlike Anthropic (along with insisting on signing commits and "don't abuse the robot" the reason I started to use OpenAI instead of Anthropic --- not that I am under the illusion they are any less evil overall) but I think now there is starting to be a carrot towards Codex usage since there sessions are "cached forever". I assume if you use Pi you get 12 hours of cache instead.
Switched to DeepSeek Harness recently, their new Creator Mode is amazing: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/s/sxg7aAM6rS
X link for people who don’t use Reddit:
https://x.com/DeepSeekHarness/status/2117256196227019194
Lol at the idea that X is somehow more user-friendly than Reddit
Does Pi come with an auto mode that blocks dangerous actions? It didn't last time I checked, and these measures are critical to protect prod (and your personal files, etc) from a confused agent.
I gave the harness a try and it is refreshing, but the insistence on staying bare bones and not implementing basic functionality natively, together with no vetting process for popular 3rd party modules, made me return to Claude Code.
> bear bones
*bare
ty, edited
You have time to watch over your agents?
You'd have to install an extension or write a function that intercepts tool calls.
gotgenes/pi-permission-system and the ai-guard authorizer can do a lot here, it feels very similar to cc auto mode.
I built a policy authorizer on top of pi-permission-system that looks kinda like nftables that models commands/subcommands/options as read/write and enfores policies depending on if the sub agent is read only or write, which really cuts down on the stupid decisions and nicely complements AI cmd review. Pi shines for making things like that possible.
like the auto mode classifier? if it doesn't then... that's a risky tradeoff
Sounds to me like it isnt basic functionality if it all works ;)
Well yeah, the whole point of pi is that you build it to your workflow. If you dislike the entire point of a project, it’s not for you. I run my agents in a sandbox. When Claude or Codex then double sandbox themselves, it gets really annoying.
I would not trust auto mode in the first place.
Wrap your agent of choice in e.g. docker sandbox, nono.sh, Nvidia OpenShell, microsanbox or any other sandboxing tool and run it without any checks (i.e. "yolo mode", dangerously-skip-permissions etc.)
IMHO it makes the whole category of problems around permission fatigue, trusting the harness (or plugin) authors etc go away.
I did that. Customized Pi to run in Bubblewrap, made an action authorization flow, etc. But that's throwing the baby with the bathwater. This gives you a harmless, less capable agent. To get both safety and usefulness, Ant's solution of a fast classifier works really well.
I use https://pi.dev/packages/pi-warden with Jev (but can use other Decisions API), it would make sense to combine with pi-permission-system to get the CC two stage "default auto" mode.
> having a ton of CLAUDE.md files scattered about various GitHub hobby repos is great guerrilla marketing
Their real marketing comes/came from https://github.com/claude phenomenon. Irrespective of what underlying model you are using the claude code harness just sticks this github user as git commit author and then you have to make an effort to remove it. That is just odd.
Agreed that it's annoying by default, but it's quite easy to disable: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings-reference?ref=expla...
My biggest claude code problem is that it calls git status with fsmonitor turned off via env variables and command line argument and I work on a super big repository.
I'm spawning a lot of agents to work in parallel. I guess I should just use the API, but it just shows that it does some random stuff you might not agree with. 99% of the users are ok with it because they don't have a 10gb repository
I am a CC user on the 20x, 5x is too small for me. Doing some quick maths I found that the Anthropic subscription it is a bargain compared to other models on API usage.
Does using Pi saves you so much token overhead that my maths are wrong?
There are some extensions you can use to use your claude subscription on Pi, it runs Claude Code under the hood but with pi's prompts. The same is possible with Opencode
Yeah but then you still get Claude’s and codex massive system prompt which is around 20k tokens last I checked.
There is no 20x any longer, no?
I am using pi as the minimal coding agent for pc administration, incl. coding up scripts/daemons that help my infrastructure (automatically updating dns when my ISP changes my IP, automating letsencrypt wildcard cert updates and similar stuff). Tested continue.dev, aider, pi, kilocode and opencode for large projects and stuck with opencode for now. I am not fully happy though and hope something better comes along in time. It is just that the annoyances I have with it are not too problematic, I can cope. For some time I also worked with a custom harness I built on top of pi, but that wasn't great either.
Pi has been my goto agent for several months now, the project is great and basically runs everywhere. If you like Pi, I suggest taking a look at Deepseek Harness too.
For those using Claude, there's pi-claude-code[0] which is currently still the way to use Ant subs in Pi.
[0] https://github.com/earendil-works/pi-claude-code
Is that still needed now that Agent SDK usage is included in subscriptions?
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
EDIT: I was mistaken. pi uses @anthropic-ai/sdk (the client for the Messages API), not @anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk (the Agent SDK).
Does Pi support that natively?
Yes, in the sense that Ant credits some number of dollars worth of API tokens to your account and Pi has long been happy to use an Ant API key
The Agent SDK is using the Claude Code harness. The point of using Pi is to avoid using that harness entirely. It wouldn’t make sense to use the Agent SDK in Pi; you would essentially be driving a harness with another harness.
If you’ve used Codex before, then the Agent SDK is Anthropic’s equivalent of the Codex App Server, which is Codex running headlessly with a protocol to talk to it.
I don't get why most of these tools are terminal-based, can't they generate a proper UI using AI?
Model capability is what harnesses expose, I have experimented with pi using local mlx models - several 27/35B quantisations (Gemma, Qwen, Flint) and the reality is that they are much weaker than Sonnet, let alone Opus. Of course they are "free" (if you have a $3000 mac) but they are slow and dumb, useful for very routine things but comparatively bad at problem solving and trouble shooting.
I am genuinely curious to know what kind of genuine problems people are solving with opus that cant be done with sonnet or the free models. If there are problems that people are working on that only opus 5.5 can solve then were we not touching such problems last year at all (because last years best model was inferior to sonnet 5.5). And if people are solving such problems now, why cant I see any meaningful improvement in even a single software I use everyday?
Not trying to diss on anything or anybody. I want to know.
I took a few months out and it’s noticeable quite how much better opus is at least in respect of the quality of understanding. It’s a step change for me.
I don’t think OP is proposing using a local model?
Why do you limit yourself to mac?
You can run larger flash models on a modern PC using strata. These models perform pretty good even on low quants.
Furthermore, next generation open weight models will swap some compute for storage, making them more accessible for masses.
Maybe he doesn't want to wear earplugs constantly and/or doesn't generate his own electricity?
Pi users : what do you think of Mistral Vibe ?
most of the time, claude gui or codex gui is good enough. this is for people doing beyond reasonable work on edge cases.
> Someone at Anthropic must’ve caught wind… just a day after making my decision, they announced Claude Code would finally start supporting AGENTS.md files in an effort to get me to stay.
Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous?
>> Someone at Anthropic must’ve caught wind… just a day after making my decision, they announced Claude Code would finally start supporting AGENTS.md files in an effort to get me to stay.
> Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous?
I think that was tongue in cheek. And by that I don't mean the author's tongue was actually in his cheek.
I also think it went over your head. And by that I don't mean I think it literally went over your head.
It's clearly a joke, but I can forgive some people for taking it literally, given the impact that certain well-known devs have on other companies' decision-making. It's a common enough line that it's plausible this could have been a VIP whose opinions swayed a company. Not him and not Anthropic, of course, but it does happen.
I wouldn’t even say not Anthropic, Boris is soliciting recommendations for Claude Code right now in the secrets exposure thread. Hardly implausible
I can't believe you didn't pick up on the sarcasm in the GP's comment...
While I agree the sarcasm is obvious, important to remember sarcasm doesnt really translate well if english is not your first language, and notoriously does not translate well online regardless, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
'Tis a joke. His landing page says he's a dev at Salesforce, so I presume not famous.
I’m definitely not famous :^) thanks for reading!
It’s not that unreasonable, or at least wasn’t a few years ago. I complained about the Chatgpt Pro $200 not allowing basically unlimited image generation (the limits were super low) a couple years ago and the next day Sam Altman tweeted asking about switching up how they handle Pro plans and putting usage into a single pool (which is what they moved to). If he didn’t read my email directly the gist at least got to him.
> At the time of writing, there have been 244 releases to Claude Code this year; over 3/4 of these changed the system prompt or tool descriptions.
ooof, that is a lot!
And we're supposed to believe them and start one-shotting our projects...
Alternatively, what you’re seeing is continuous hill climbing and optimisations based on large scale experiments and simulated rollouts.
For me personally, I don’t use Claude Code because I can’t read the source.
At least with Codex, I know there’s a bunch of telemetry and all that, but I can have my agent inspect the source and have relatively greater confidence it’s not implanting spyware onto my machine, because a classifier thinks I’m working for Deepseek or something.
They're hill climbing by changing their system prompt... That's not how thats done.
They're changing system prompts to control how users use their llms.
Does it speak a more understandable dialect of English? "Claudish" is a minor meme at this point.
There are a ton of choices when it comes to coding harnesses - Pi being just one of them.
DeepSeek harness for example seemed really powerful when I tried it.
I'm using Cecli which started life as an Aider fork..
Until it's inevitably replaced of course
I think Anthropic is working on allowing AGENTS.md files as well. However, Claude.md files take precedence if present. If not, you fall back to AGENTS.md.
Claude now supports AGENTS.md fully but the rest of what you said holds
It has since 9/16, however folks soon realized it supports AGENTS.md, but not .agents/skills.
This is such an important detail the main issue for this was closed and then reopened with an expanded title:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/31005
Claude code may still be a good choice as long as they have Opus
I have tried Pi, but at this point I'm using a fleet of hermes agents to connect realtime via webrtc to a custom web dashboard (written in rust) that works on multiple projects/tasks atomically and simultaneously and compiles/tests locally and then submits to a private central git with all its changes and then pushes to dev for testing, then prod. The agents working on tasks can request new tasks and a supervisor is configured for each project that does a scheduled review and proposes recommendations based on what has been done and needs to be done based on the project plan...As new agents come online they can be quickly enrolled. It works well when you're working on many projects simultaneously. Its also a good use for a stack of 10 old laptops.
Damn I built almost the exact same thing lol, down the supervisor for each project and web kanban board thing. I use fly.io sprites for the compute which has been cool to experiment with.
Pi is awesome until compaction hits. I think one in every two compactions it’s failed on me ie didn’t know how to continue :(
Try pi-vcc or pi-blackhole
Thanks! I’ve taken a look at Blackhole before but it looks way to complicated for what I wanted. I’ll check out VCC. Thanks again!
I never really rely on compaction. Instead, I instruct the coding agents to maintain a handoff markdown document across sessions. Ymmv.
What about if you’ve given a plan that will take hours? How do you tell how to auto-compact since it can’t read its own environment?
Cannot show now because Github times out for me, again.
I had pi write me a ralph loop plugin. You plan with it, it breaks it down into tasks. Task success means clearing the context - if it runs out of context, it clears and starts on the same task again (code changes from previous run are left intact).
Complete with little docker-like names for Ralph sessions and the ability to resume sessions should you need to.
Point is, I would generally do this because it costs less context I think, and better tracks progress.
Ping me if you are interested and want it. Otherwise, plenty around :)
Please share with me.
Something is misconfigured on your end. I have had some trouble where parameters were incorrect, but otherwise I have used several vendors (local, openrouter, ollama cloud, kimi, deep seek) and it generally works.
Most likely context length parameters aren’t set quite right for your model/provider and you genuinely run out of context during compaction
is pi good if i just want to search through a codebase i don't know with, say, GLM?
"longtime ... over a year ago" This time dilation is getting ridiculous.
For usage with open models, I'd highly recommend Swival as an alternative to Pi: https://swival.dev
It's common to disclose that it's your own project when linking it. Don't mean to be rude or anything.
The whole AGENTS vs CLAUDE md issue was bound to be resolved. If the models are getting smarter and harnesses getting better - how could you have a product so dumb that it ignores whatever skills, instructions, references, other things that are part of the folder context it is mounted in.
Having claude code ignore agents.md just made it seem dumb. At this point, you probably don't need either.
> At this point, you probably don't need either.
There's only so much stuff I have the patience to tell it in a session before I write it down somewhere.
"Write down the rules I told you in CLAUDE.md"
bbapp is legitimately good too
> It seems like there isn’t someone high-up whose job is strictly to say “no” to these requests, which is incredibly important when it comes to product engineering
Ah, product management - we know so few of ye who know what you're doing.
I get 150 tokens/sec on my coding agent, if you are on a MacBook, thats with an M1
try kapitsa as the inference engine with pi as the harness
It works really well
Man, my M1 Pro unfortunately only has 16GB of RAM; it has been such a limiter to using local models. I'll give kapitsa a try, I see I should be able to squeeze some smaller models on
kapitsa is customized well to just a small selection of models that are in vogue right now, focusing on qwen and nemotron
compared to llama.cpp that tries to cater to all but does so only averagely
check the catalogue and see if one of the quantizations fit
Anecdotally I run semi nightly harness and local model test runs, and opencode consistently outperforms ohmypi on various code bench tasks.
Note though that this for local models that can run on a 5090, so, kinda dumb models with a small context window. Also they might perform differently on a custom pi setup rather than the very feature rich ohmypi.
Mostly the runs just cause me to get decision fatigue so I typically just use opencode and let a frontier model choose whatever cheaper models it wants to orchestrate with, so long as it's one that's not on the same token budget.
P.S. I'd always wondered who it was that got caleb.software before I could... Outshot in a western duel!
Opencode's system prompt is much smaller than omp. Smaller models may not work well just because of this. Also omp is not pi.
Alas Opencode's source is hideous to read.
When you say "kinda dumb" it's worth noting that the smaller coding models tend not to actually need system prompts to be helpful coding assistants, etc. Qwen maybe more than Muse Glimmer? I've not tested Qwen 3.8 27B enough yet. Even Gemma 4 didn't seem to need much.
Muse Glimmer is so absolutely tuned for one particular pattern (turn-by-turn agentic coding and assistance) that it will do it more or less without a prompt at all (except to set the reasoning level maybe). Beyond the tools announcement, it feels to me like it almost only needs a prompt to do plan mode stuff. If LM Studio (in either of its forms) or Unsloth Desktop had proper support for running inside a linux container rather than just a filesystem sandbox, you'd barely need a dedicated coding agent at all. Osaurus gets even closer.
I wanted to like Opencode but I can't, really. I am enjoying Pi slightly more because it's just way less convoluted and obscure.
FWIW I use Paseo for the GUI, which to some extent eliminates that aspect of decision fatigue; if you like Paseo's UI well enough, you can have it with almost any harness. And since it can connect to its daemon via ssh you can still have the desktop GUI with a container. (Not clear to me if Opencode v2 Desktop makes remote connections to the daemon or just wraps the web interface like v1 did)
I do not know how it is with Glimmer, but other Facebook models (Muse and whatever is currently hiding under "Crouton") sure love ignoring direct instructions to do or not do something important (like not using particular broken/inefficient tools). Doesn't matter if it's repeated ten times in screaming caps, they'll still ignore it at least sometimes.
No other model I've used does this.
ohmypi is not pi, it's based on pi, but it's not pi.
Bro talks like an expert and got a point but still using gmail: calebdotsoftware@gmail.com, come on...
neckbeards and their incredibly autistic, specific preferences about everything that nobody cares about.
I mean... sure, yeah.
But this feels like six weeks (or more) out-of-date. And so it is - from mid-September. And I know that observing such a thing sounds bizarre and teenage, but that's kind of a long time right now; we're at a moment in history when things are moving fast.
We're not really fully ready for the traffic TBH, but for those who few of you choose to click, this is what we've been doing with pi lately:
https://magenta.cryptograss.live/
Made me click, but I have no idea what this is supposed to be.