We know that a lack of control over their environment makes animals, including humans, depressed.
The software we use has so much of this lack of control. It's their way, their branding, their ads, their app. You're the guest on your own device.
It's no wonder everyone hates technology. It's not theirs. They are made to be subservient to it. People don't like having masters.
A world with software that is malleable, personal, and cheap - this could do a lot of good. Real ownership.
The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation.
I'm quite optimistic for this future.
Model + prompt + function calls.
There are many such wrappers, and they differ largely on UI deployment/integration. Harness feels like a decent term, though "coding harness" feels a bit vague.
and you can build cool stuff on top of it too!
Pleased to meet you!
For me, it just didn’t compare in quality with Claude CLI and OpenCode. It didn’t finish the job. Interesting for extending, certainly, but not where my productivity gains lie.
Went from codex/claude code -> opencode -> pi -> oh-my-pi
This is quite nice — I do think there’s a version of pi’s design choices which could live in a static harness, but fully covering the same capabilities as pi without a dynamic language would be difficult. (You could imagine specifying a programmable UI, etc — various ways to extend the behavior of the system, and you’d like end up with an interpreter in the harness)
At least, you’d like to have a way to hot reload code (Elixir / Erlang could be interesting)
This is my intuition, at least.
I'm super on board the rust train right now & super loving it. But no, code hot loading is not common.
Most code in the world is dead code. Most languages are for dead code. It's sad. Stop writing dead code (2022) was no where near the first, is decades and decades late in calling this out, but still a good one. https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/
No serialization/JSON-RPC layer between a TS CLI and Elixir server. TS TUI libraries utilities are really nice (I rewrote the Elixir-based CLI prototype as it was slowing me down). Easy to extend with custom tools without having to write them in Elixir, which can be intimidating.
But you're right that Erlang's computing vision lends itself super well to this problem space.
Their agent mail was great & very early in agent orchestration. Code agent search is amazing & will tell you what's happening in every harness. Their Franktui is a ridiculously good rust tui. They have project after project after project after project and they are all so good.
Didn't know they had a rust Pi. Nice.
So it can share code with the web app.
Because writing it in javascript is easier than writing it in raw brute forced assembly.
The extensibility is really nice. It was easy to get it using my preferred issue tracker; and I've recently overridden the built-in `read` and `write` commands to use Emacs buffers instead. I'd like to override `edit` next, but haven't figured out an approach that would play to the strengths of LLMs (i.e. not matching exact text) and Emacs (maybe using tree-sitter queries for matches?). I also gave it a general-purpose `emacs_eval`, which it has used to browse documentation with EWW.
Let me also drop a link to the Pi Emacs mode here for anyone who wants to check it out: https://github.com/dnouri/pi-coding-agent -- or use: M-x package-install pi-coding-agent
We've been building some fun integrations in there like having RET on the output of `read`, `write`, `edit` tool calls open the corresponding file and location at point in an Emacs buffer. Parity with Pi's fantastic session and tree browsing is hopefully landing soon, too. Also: Magit :-)
Wondering if you wanted a similar interface (though a GUI not just CLI) where it's not for coding what would you call that?
Same idea cycle through models, ask question, drag-drop images, etc...
"harness" fits pretty nicely IMO. It can be used as a single word, and it's not too semantically overloaded to be useful in this context.
Does anyone have an idea as to why this would be a feature? don't you want to have a discussion with your agent to iron out the details before moving onto the implementation (build) phase?
In any case, looks cool :)
EDIT 1: Formatting EDIT 2: Thanks everyone for your input. I was not aware of the extensibility model that pi had in mind or that you can also iterate your plan on a PLAN.md file. Very interesting approach. I'll have a look and give it a go.
https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...
As for subagents, Pi has sessions. And it has a full session tree & forking. This is one of my favorite things, in all harnesses: build the thing with half the context, then keep using that as a checkpoint, doing new work, from that same branch point. It means still having a very usable lengthy context window but having good fundamental project knowledge loaded.
There are already multiple implementations of everything.
With a powerful and extensible core, you don't need everything prepackaged.
EDIT: Thank you to both responders. I'll just try the two options out then.
That's how the pi-coding-agent Emacs package interacts with pi; and it's how I write automated tests for my own pi extensions (along with a dummy LLM that emits canned responses).
ChatGPT $20/month is alright but I got locked out for a day after a couple hours. Considering the GitHub pro plus plan.
https://github.com/elyase/awesome-personal-ai-assistants?tab...
Open source: https://github.com/isagawa-co/isagawa-kernel
Eg some form of comprehensive planning/spec workflow is best modeled as an extension vs natively built in. And the extension still ends up feeling “native” in use
After my max sub expired I decided to try Kimi on a more open harness, and it ended up being one of the worst (and eye opening experiences) I had with the agentic world so far.
It was completely alienating and so much 'not for me', that afterwards I went back and immediately renewed my claude sub.
Here's the problem with Claude Code: it acts like it's got security, but it's the equivalent of a "do not walk on grass" sign. There's no technical restrictions at play, and the agent can (maliciously or accidentally) bypass the "restrictions".
That's why Pi doesn't have restrictions by default. The logic is: no matter what agent you are using, you should be using it in a real sandbox (container, VM, whatever).
Where did you get this perspective from?
> I thought pi and its tools were supposed to be minimal and extensible. So why is a subagent extension bundling six agents I never asked for that I can’t disable or remove?
Why do you think a random subagents extension is under the same philosophy as pi?
Your blog post says little about pi proper, it's essentially concerned with issues you had with the ecosystem of extensions, often made by random people who either do or do not get the philosophy? Why would that be up to pi to enforce?
Note that if you sandbox to literally just the working directly, pi itself wont run since pretty much every linux application needs to be able to read from /usr and /etc
Here’s an example config: https://github.com/earendil-works/gondolin/blob/main/host/ex...
I think I published it. Check the pi package page.
There's something in the default Codex harness that makes it fight with both arms behind its back, maybe the sandboxing is overly paranoid or something.
With Pi I can one-shot many features faster and more accurately than with Codex-cli.
They are all open source though so you can just find out whats going on if you want right?
The prompt shown is
"Who's your daddy and what does he do?"
Is this a joke or tech? Is the author a dev or a clown?
This coding agent certainly couldn't give a fuck.
Anyway, even if you give your agent permission, there's no secure way to know whether what they're asking to is what they'll actually do, etc.
Pi supports permission popups, but doesn't use them by default. Their example extensions show how to do it (add an event listener for `tool_call` events; to block the call put `block: true` in its result).
> there's no secure way to know whether what they're asking to is what they'll actually do
What do you mean? `tool_call` event listeners are given the parameters of the tool call; so e.g. a call to the `bash` tool will show the exact command that will execute (unless we block it, of course).