I feel the same way about needing support for sub-agents, those feel pretty foundational to me.

I suspect that a smart model driving multiple dumber models for work and then using sub-agents with the same smart model for adversarial review will be a pretty common pattern.

Personally, I got a bit confused about Pi having most of that stuff as plugins since I remember how much of a mess Eclipse was where so much was just loosely fitting together plugins and just went with OpenCode since it covers most of my needs out of the box. Guess that might also be a sign of me getting older, because my IDEs and desktop environments are all closer to stock too.

▲ sunaookami 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hah, it's the complete opposite for me :D. In Claude Code I disabled all sub-agents stuff, disabled nearly all tools but Bash, Edit, Write and WebSearch and replaced WebFetch with my own tool that doesn't summarize anything because the results were always worse with sub-agents, they always lack the necessary context and weaker models summarize bad. I also replaced the system prompt with my own that cuts a LOT of tokens, agents don't need a 10k+ system prompt anymore.

▲ KronisLV 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's interesting! You don't have cases where the main session has important planning stuff but the actual work to execute has so much crap in it that context compaction will probably dig into the important plan stuff too much and make it too lossy? Also what about the cache read costs for longer context sizes?

Using sub-agents for example also lets me decrease the default context size in Claude Code instead of running at the full 1M like:

  /autocompact 420k

or deal with Codex's 258k tokens (seriously quite tiny by modern standards).

Same idea with something like OpenCode, there I even configured custom agents for review: https://opencode.ai/docs/agents/

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surgical_fire an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> You don't have cases where the main session has important planning stuff but the actual work to execute has so much crap in it that context compaction will probably dig into the important plan stuff too much and make it too lossy?

For that is it not better to have separate sessions for planning stuff and doing actual work? Pi is super flexible with session management, and a lot of that can be automated by its extension system.

	▲	dools 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What’s the difference between sub agents and separate sessions?

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cyanydeez an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

running local models, now with Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, they have 256k, but when they get up there their speed is just too slow. So i've taken https://github.com/Tarquinen/opencode-dynamic-context-prunin... and started improving it. It already worked well to get a lot of mileage out of just taking tool calls, code modifications, etc, and dumping them in favor of a summary.

But they'd still inevitably get to long in the tooth, and context poisoning meant they'd just eventually not be able to stay in the preferred context size, which for me is 64k-128k. So, I extended it with an eviction command and required a ratio. So instead of a summary of work, it now just places a waypoint. The waypoint basically means the context has a semi-coherent context but without all the baggage.

I'm on like day 3 of a single session with 3m tokens removed and still in the sweet spot. So it evicts to beneath the lower limit, compresses to the upper limit, then evicts again.

It's amazing how resilient it is if you give it a good plan. The work flow has basically been:

1. Write up an implementation document for some new set of features.

2. Rewrite the implementation as a TDD document

3. Set it to work.

The only thing I haven't figured out is it likes to stop when it hits the finish line of the subparts, but likely we're going to end up with the master of puppets monitoring these things and just set them to evaluating what they've done.

	▲	TobTobXX 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> taking tool calls, code modifications, etc, and dumping them in favor of a summary Doesn't that destroy the cache? I find that caching significantly sped up my Qwen, especially on said larger contexts.

▲ Pxtl 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

That sounds like you just NIH'd mr Zechner's Pi Coding Agent. Those were basically its founding design: yolo-mode security, simple design, minimalist system prompts, plug-in based for anything fancy (even sub-agents and web).

▲ buserror 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I did the same, also, the fact the tools evolve so fast, I dont want to waste time on a particular one while it might be obsolete next week. So either it works now, other I pick something else.

▲ DanielHB an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

oh-my-pi is a fork of Pi that adds a lot of this stuff

https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi

I haven't tried it much though, can't vouch how well it works.

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probst an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Exceptionally well is my takeaway. It’s the only harness I am using these days. I was previously using pi and codex mostly, but also the ones built into editors like zed, vscode, and the jetbrains IDEs.

On top of that, somewhat unrelated I’ll agree but still, it has support for vim keybindings

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spiffytech an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Pi vs omp is hotly debated within my friend group. It has most things you could want, ready out of the box, but also a lot of things you'd never want and it's constantly 5% broken. Some people love that trade, others don't.

	▲	yurishimo 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Glad I'm not the only want to find it a bit janky/broken at times. They seem to constantly be pushing updates which is nice, but I treat it mostly as a black box. Anecdotally, I find the auto compaction (or what I assume is happening when the context magically drops) to be hit or miss. I do like how easy it is to use my work cursor sub and business chat gpt at the same time. Then I use nearly free cursor models for dumb shit and Sol for real problems.

▲ surgical_fire an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's actually the main reason I chose Pi.

I did create some extensions where it spawns sub agents for specific tasks, especially when I want to keep the context clean or when I really want to offload a piece of work to a cheaper model. And for that I have a high degree of control over, I know which model is being used for each subtask.

I find Claude Code too unwieldy for my tastes. Pi's philosophy of being very light on features nut highly flexible for customization, clicked very well for the way I work.

▲ embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Some things are impossible to just tack on or work around though, like MCP, while other things, can be done by just composing stuff.

Like sub-agents, you could just instruct pi/any harness with a user prompt/system prompt to start new invocations of itself, if you share what the exact command is, and pi or any other harness will do their own poor man's version of sub-agent via standard unix programs.

	▲	k__ 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What would you say is a good harness with subagents?