Hard disagree.

Pi has optimizations as well, and development is quite active.

We are literally months into this new frontier. Mainstream harnesses are not far off from a minimal + extensible open alternative.

You don’t have to build your own plugins, as you can simply install an existing plugin that does what the mainstream harnesses do. Folks are already making the same functionality, but with more control to the user.

If you are a builder, like many reading this thread, pi is the way to go. Pi already gives you the tools to leverage LLMs to assist with building plugins, if that’s the way you want to go.

> Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool.

I don't think that you really get what this new era of software is about otherwise you would understand why the experienced are spending time tinkering on the so called harness (like openclaw did)

And yet Pi has done a few things that were quite transformational. A lot of recent agentic libraries explicitly credit Pi for design ideas.

We’re so early in this technology phase, now is the time to tinker and explore. At one point that window will close.

> Something that is overlooked: the mainstream harnesses have a huge advantage in telemetry and datapoints to use to improve the harness. They have internal teams building the tooling. They have tight integration built-in with their own backends (e.g. optimizing for caching).

> Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool.

Do I want to become completely dependent on the pricy pay-as-you-go tool? In the long run that will make me powerless.