Pi Coding Agent Reviews and Details

Social recommendations and mentions

• GLM-5.3: Frontier Coding with Emergent Cyber Capabilities

  What the person above is suggesting: * https://pi.dev/ * https://omp.sh/ Personally I also think that OpenCode is nice, their CLI version is enjoyable and their desktop/web version is mostly okay: * https://opencode.ai/. - Source: Hacker News / 9 days ago

• Hax – a minimalist, terminal-native coding agent written in C

  I know the Pi [0] folks had some trouble with newer models [1]. [0]: https://pi.dev/ [1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/7/4/better-models-worse-tools/. - Source: Hacker News / 11 days ago

• Pi Agent vs Claude Code After 100 Hours of Real Use 🔥

  Pi is the coding agent Mario Zechner released in late 2025, now maintained under Earendil. Zechner joined Earendil in April 2026 in a blog post he titled "I've sold out," and the core stayed MIT licensed. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago

• Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index

  I use https://pi.dev/ which works fine out of the box but is fairly minimal and intended to be customized. There are many extensions. OpenCode or oh-my-pi might make more sense if you just want a batteries-included agent. You can also make Claude Code work with other models without too much work, but I think that's asking for headaches. - Source: Hacker News / 17 days ago

• Litos: Building a Minimal AI Coding Agent, from Scratch in pure C#/.NET

  I divided the project into three parts, inspired by Tau's "brain, environment, face" split, and by Mario Zechner's pi:. - Source: dev.to / 18 days ago

• Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

  Maybe you should try using Pi [0] if you care a lot about owning your harness and making sure you're in control of what goes into your system prompt and context? [0]: https://pi.dev. - Source: Hacker News / 25 days ago

• Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

  An extensible LLM agent (such as https://pi.dev/ or maybe hermes) written in common lisp could be interesting. Conditions and restarts and general debugging and repair of the live system, fast startup, native execution speeds, ability to add or replace or modify core functionality on the fly, solid multi-threading support, dynamic introspection including documentation, CLOS and multiple dispatch, saved images. - Source: Hacker News / 26 days ago

• I built an AI dev harness that isn't allowed to trust itself. Then I checked the part doing the not-trusting.

  Over one night I rebuilt both halves of that sentence on pi — an open, npm-distributed, forkable agent runtime — mostly to find out how much of my harness was discipline and how much was one host's shape. Two public repos came out of it: pi-eval for the proof half, and pi-gates for the irreversibility half. - Source: dev.to / 27 days ago

• Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for ~10B

  I've briefly played around with https://pi.dev, appeared to work quite well. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago

• Stop Using OpenCode

  I see some folk recommending https://pi.dev/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago

• Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon

  > Gemma isn’t very good at agentic execution I had no issues with it for C++ development with https://pi.dev. I'm yet to try it with Zed Editor. I don't rely on agents too much. However, I used it on Chromium's codebase to research some functionalities, let's say for searching. Requests like: check my last commit and do the same for SetterA and SetterB; it also ran without any errors. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago

• Grok Build Is OSS

  I would recommend using https://pi.dev/ over Grok Build with your xAI subscription at this point. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago

• Why I route each phase of my coding agent to a different model

  My method is simple to state: treat a coding turn as a sequence of phases, and give each phase the model best suited to it. I've packaged it as pi-tiered-router, an extension for the pi coding agent — but the method matters more than the package, so that's what this post is really about. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago

• I Built a Telegram Client for Pi

  To all the haters to not knowing what "pi" means in this context. Is mario zechner's ai agent / coding harness [1][2], similar in spirit albeit much less complex to claude code or openai's codex and others. I wouldn't call it third tier. If anything alongside opencode, and codex, its one of the "first tier" and the only non-VC-backed (at least before mario joined earendil (idk about earendil rising or not)... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

• Ask HN: What is your AI harness that lets you switch LLM models easily?

  Pi (https://pi.dev), a TUI based harness, lets you cycle through all configured models through the keybindings CTRL+P (forward) and SHIFT+CTRL+P (backwards). Personally using it for switching from and to locally served Gemma and Qwen endpoints. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

• How I Manage My VPS With Pi’s SSH Extension

  Pi is a minimal, open-source agentic harness: a terminal program that wraps a language model with the tools it needs to read files, edit code, and run shell commands similar to any existing AI terminal like Claude Code or OpenCode. The difference is that SSH extension routes those shell commands to a remote server instead of your local machine, so you can administer a VPS in plain language while reviewing each... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago

• Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

  Thanks to being unemployed, the last few months I've been experimenting a lot with coding agents, harnesses and most importantly, the workflows around them. Currently I'm refining what I think works best for me, which I'd call something like "issues/PR based LLM workflow", powered mainly by this action I'm building on top of the [Pi coding agent](https://pi.dev) SDK:... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

• ZCode: Claude Code from the Makers of GLM

  If you haven't yet you should give a chance to https://pi.dev I've been using it exclusively (and extending it, see https://a.l3x.in/ai) for months with mainly GLM-4.7 then 5.1 and now 5.2 and I could hardly be any happier. I'm still working on a "Github/Forgejo first" based workflow but also quite happy with it already, basically most of my sessions run as a ci/cd job (triggered by "/pi" comments) and generate... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

• Ask HN: Line by Line Agentic Coding

  I like to use Pi (https://pi.dev/), and I recently got it to make an approval extension for itself. It has a lot of documentation built-in for the agent to modify the behavior of the app. I got it to display all proposed file change diffs and bash commands and made it so I can either approve the action or deny it with a message for it. It was surprisingly easy to tell it to modify things things the diff viewing... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

• Claude Code Is Steganographically Marking Requests

  For open source agents, like https://pi.dev, it is as easy as asking it to create a plugin to stop the session or ask for permission whenever the LLM is trying to execute a commit command. Then you add one line in AGENTS.md stating the LLM should never commit, push or perform any write git operation without explicit being asked to. So in the very rare case that the LLM bypass you instruction, you catch it... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

• Ask HN: Why don't LLM harnesses enable/expose custom middleware hooks?

  Https://pi.dev specifically prides itself on having many extensions hook points. Is that one you've looked at? If so, it might be something they'd be willing to add a hook for if you open an issue. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago