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Praise for Pi

April 22, 2026

#ai #agents #extensibility #open source

For months I’ve been a die-hard Claude Code user. It was the first agent harness I used, and it was always good enough for me to get things done. But lately it’s felt more and more bloated as Anthropic crams feature after feature into it. It’s a lot of stuff I don’t use and don’t need. (Seriously, I don’t want a gotcha game-style virtual buddy in my coding tool I use every day.)

But hark my friends! I have a new love! Behold: Pi, the little agent harness that could. As a neovim user I feel seen. Pi is barebones:

Pi is aggressively extensible so it doesn’t have to dictate your workflow. Features that other tools bake in can be built with extensions, skills, or installed from third-party pi packages. This keeps the core minimal while letting you shape pi to fit how you work.

No MCP. Build CLI tools with READMEs (see Skills), or build an extension that adds MCP support. Why?

No sub-agents. There’s many ways to do this. Spawn pi instances via tmux, or build your own with extensions, or install a package that does it your way.

No permission popups. Run in a container, or build your own confirmation flow with extensions inline with your environment and security requirements.

No plan mode. Write plans to files, or build it with extensions, or install a package.

No built-in to-dos. Use a TODO.md file, or build your own with extensions.

No background bash. Use tmux. Full observability, direct interaction.

And because Pi ships with documentation on how to extend it, you can just ask it to build what you want it to do. In my first hour with the harness I built and shipped a Pi extension:

  1. I couldn’t see a way to use OpenCode Zen/Go as my model provider (I discovered [and facepalmed] later that this is possible out of the box)
  2. I asked Pi to build a way for me to do that
  3. Pi created the extension and bundled it as an npm package to publish (pi-opencode)

It was a lot of fun. That’s just the surface of what you build for it: https://pi.dev/packages. (Of course, it runs Doom.) The vision for computing as a highly personal, custom system of expression feels real. It feels like the delightful chaos of MySpace, but bigger and built faster. I still spend most of my days oscillating wildly between hype-pilled and full of existential dread over the future of software. But Pi is making the ride a lot more enjoyable.