Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi

(caleb.software)

58 points | by karagenit 2 hours ago

14 comments

  • siraben 5 minutes ago
    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

  • sigttou 21 minutes ago
    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

  • rudedogg 35 minutes ago
    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.

    • judge2020 16 minutes ago
      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.

    • suoloordi 23 minutes ago
      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.
    • alexhans 18 minutes ago
      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-...

    • godelski 11 minutes ago
      Yes and no. Any harness can use the subscription but must go through `claude -p` mode, which is more limited.
    • sigttou 24 minutes ago
      Yes, it is allowed and supported normally by pi and others.
  • justauserid 37 minutes ago
    > 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.

  • samayashar 20 minutes ago
    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.
    • SurfingAlpaca 4 minutes ago
      Claude now supports AGENTS.md fully but the rest of what you said holds
  • alfiedotwtf 9 minutes ago
    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 :(
  • komali2 1 hour ago
    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!

    • dofm 18 minutes ago
      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)

    • bdemirkir 45 minutes ago
      Opencode's system prompt is much smaller than omp. Smaller models may not work well just because of this. Also omp is not pi.
  • andsoitis 1 hour ago
    > 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?

    • bluerooibos 1 hour ago
      'Tis a joke. His landing page says he's a dev at Salesforce, so I presume not famous.
    • karagenit 1 hour ago
      I’m definitely not famous :^) thanks for reading!
    • TacticalCoder 1 hour ago
      >> 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.

      • cwnyth 1 hour ago
        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.
        • derektank 41 minutes ago
          I wouldn’t even say not Anthropic, Boris is soliciting recommendations for Claude Code right now in the secrets exposure thread. Hardly implausible
      • arcanemachiner 1 hour ago
        I can't believe you didn't pick up on the sarcasm in the GP's comment...
  • O_H_E 18 minutes ago
    > 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...

  • harrisonjackson 1 hour ago
    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.

    • arcanemachiner 1 hour ago
      > 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.

  • aeon_ai 35 minutes ago
    > 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.

  • yieldcrv 46 minutes ago
    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

    • ohmahjong 13 minutes ago
      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
  • jMyles 35 minutes ago
    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/

    • skybrian 24 minutes ago
      Made me click, but I have no idea what this is supposed to be.