Has anyone (other than OpenClaw) used pi? (https://shittycodingagent.ai/, https://pi.dev/)

Any insights / suggestions / best practices?

Its really fantastic. I can't imagine why you'd go through the effort using Claude Code with other models when pi is a much better harness. There's tons of extensions already available, and its trivial to prompt an LLM to create your any new extension you want. Lacking creativity and want something from another harness?

> Run <other harness> in tmux and interrogate it how feature X works, then build me the equivalent as a pi extension.

Maybe in a few years there will be obvious patterns with harnesses having built really optimal flows, but right now it works so much better to experiment and try new approaches and prompts and flows, and pi is the easiest one to tweak and make it your own.

Yes, it's super cool. Check Mario's latest talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dli5slNaJu0 Armin also has some videos covering it on his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ArminRonacher/ Pi's Discord is still nice, even though it was a bit flooded after the openclaw thing.

I bought a $30 Z.ai Coding Plan sub to go with it. 7 million tokens has only gone through 2% of my weekly usage using the GLM-5.1 model. I am pretty happy.

I am only doing single project workflows, but with Z.ai I feel like it opens a whole new door to parallel workflows without hitting usage limits.

Pi is a lot simpler than Claude and a lot more transparent in how it operates.

It's designed to be a small simple core with a rich API which you can use for extensions (providing skills, tools, or just modifying/extending the agent's behaviour).

It's likely that you'll eventually need to find extensions for some extended functionality, but for each feature you can pick the one that fits your need exactly (or just use Pi to hack a new extension).

I really love it. The simplicity is key. The first play project I made with it was a public transport map with GTFS data - click on a stop and get the routes and the timetables for the stop and the surrounding ones. I used Qwen3.5-35B on Mac M1 Max with oMLX. It wrote 98% of the code with very little interaction from me. And very useful is the /tree feature to go back in history when the model is on a wrong track or my instructions where not good enough. I usually work in a two path approach: first let the model explore what it needs to fulfill the task and write it into CONTEXT.md (or any other name to your liking). Then restart the session with the CONTEXT.md. That way you are always nicely operating in 5-15k context, i.e. all is very fast. Create an account for pi (or docker) and make sure it can't walk into other directories - it has bash access. Add the browser-tools to the skills and load them when useful: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-skills

No need for database MCP, I use postgres and tell it to use psql.

Occasionally I use prettier to remove indentation - the LLM makes a lot less edit errors that way. Just add the indent back before you commit. Or tell pi to do it.

had been using claude max/opus with pi and the results have been incredible. Having pi write an AGENTS.md and dip your feet into creating your own skills specific to the project.

With the anthropic billing change (not being able to use the max credits for pi) I think I have to cancel - as I'm whirring through credits now.

Going to move to the $250/mo OpenAI codex plan for now.

I use Daniel Meissler’s PAI and it’s been an incredible harness.

i really have been enjoying pi a lot

at first i thought i was goring to build lots of extra plugins and commands but what ended up working for me is:

- i have a simpel command that pulls context from a linear issue

- simple review command

- project specific skills for common tasks

Reluctantly, the dev seems to have a stinky attitude.

He went on an "OSS vacation", which is perfectly reasonable and said he'd be back on a certain date. I had a PR open for a trivial fix, someone asked when it would land. I shared he was still away. After his return I politely asked, "@badlogic hey, what can we do to progress this? Thanks x"

I then got what I would consider an abusive reply, because he confused me with someone else. In the meantime he extended his vacation. Didn't even think his shitty attitude was worthy of an apology, that HE confused me with someone else.

https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/discussions/1475#discuss...

And another other thing I fixed with no attribution, just landed it himself separately. https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/discussions/1080

and

https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/issues/1079#event-223896...

Now he's seemingly marked anything with my name on as a "clanker", despite all my changes being by hand.

I've been around open source enough to have a thick skin, but when i'm doing something "for fun" and someone treats you like that, i'd rather avoid it as far as possible. I certainly could not in good faith use this project for anything work related.