alt Hacker NewsGoodbye Claude, hello Pi
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Pi is a good harness (I finally gave it a try w/ abliterated GLM), but not with Anthropic subscription, and there are multiple reasons to avoid alternative harnesses with their models in general (imho):
1. Potential ban due to ToS violation;
2. It doesn't follow all Anthropic's communication mechanisms out-of-the-box, they heavily use custom headers, hidden flags, and undocumented API features that affect models' behavior;
3. Compact is better in CC (significantly);
4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);
5. It's almost unavoidable to use Pi's extensions, and I wouldn't trust my oauth token to anything third-party (take a look at regular reddit/X posts where people getting banned due to such leaks and abuse) -> it takes enormous amount of hacking on top of Pi to get closer to CC abilities.
CC has hooks and mods, even ui_* (undocumented) protocol if you need some big customization, those are enough to implement whatever you want on top of CC.
Also, I'm working with CC from the very first versions, as for me - it's the best harness (as-is) on the market. I have zero clue what problems people are talking about (except known big issues, 3-4 over the years, I've never had serious problems, at all). Seamless and smooth experience, optimized for Anthropic models.
P.S. You can consider this as Stockholm syndrome effect, but... you have close to zero chances to get unbanned with Anthropic, and it's the best coding model(s) available today.
I became interested in how the harness works internally so I could try to implement my own small AI agent in a business project. And I realized that right now, most of the model’s efficiency lies precisely in the harness. And that there’s a whole complicated world inside it, one that will soon become more complex than the models themselves.
All my experiments using third-party harnesses for code-writing agents showed that if a model is used in a non-native harness, it sometimes burns through 5 times as many tokens, and the results are worse. That’s why I now use MCP calls not to the models directly, but to new sessions within their harnesses.
Now, almost every day I see new announcements about coding agents with bold claims about their superiority. But in none of them have I seen a clear description of how they’re better or exactly how their architecture for working with models is superior to the original harnesses.
As I understand it, Pi is like "Lego" for building your own harness. But do you know what happened after I’d been using real Lego for half a year? I have 15 kg of it loose in three bags. My son and I have almost given up on the idea of sorting it out and actually using it properly. It’s pretty much the same story with my MCP, plugins, and skills for Claude.
Pi is without contest the best harness. Because it’s yours, the total control is the only way to move from driving agents to orchestrating them.
My interruptions and frustration with llms has gone down a cliff. It’s amazing to see what just a few lines of system prompt really can do to keep agents doing the correct thing much more often.
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]
I’ve been using Pi since April. I switched from using copilot CLI which definitely isn’t the most frontier harness going but was more “feature rich” at the time than the stripped down feature set you get with Pi out the box.
The bit I was instantly drawn to was how much access you are given to change every part of it. Its similar to the text buffer in emacs where every cell in the buffer is fully accessible to any edits you need to make. My configurations are fairly minimal, but for instance I match the accept cli calls that could be destructive and edits to files in the same way copilot is set up.
Currently my pi config turns it into a tutor. It no longer makes edits, just advises and is designed to teach. I make all the code edits by hand. Use deepseek flash with it because its stupid cheap. It works for me, but honestly you can set up pi in any way you want which is why I personally think its the best harness by virtue of anything being possible as long as you can dream it up!
The author is complaining about Claude Code inside VSCode. The complaints don’t apply to the Claude Desktop App, for the most part. You don’t need VSCode to review code, just use the Claude app which has good support already. And if you’re moving to Pi, maybe use it with ThinkRail, from JetBrains. It’s my favorite harness since it can do everything I want: multiple models including local, focus on reviewing code after the agents are done, uses worktrees by default. And it adds some nifty tools for designing software which I am really enjoying. One thing it can’t do is let you edit files :) but that is ok, in the rare case I write something I use emacs, thank God no more need for a heavy IDE!
This is interesting, I've been using claude for work stuff because they pay the $200 subscripion but at home I've been using pi with glm-5.3-flash and now deepseekv4.1-flash.
When I'm doing work stuff I'm really not liking claude and only using it because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses. If work would give me a $20 ollama cloud subscription in place of the $200 claude one I would be much more happy at work, that's how much I dislike it.
Switched to DeepSeek Harness recently, their new Creator Mode is amazing: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/s/sxg7aAM6rS
I built a Claude Code mod that displays a dashboard linking issues/PRs to claude sessions and allowing me to organize my work more around activities, such as reviewing, working on issues, fixing PRs, developing specs and ad hoc sessions. As someone coming from a vim in tmux, keyboard only workflow, this works most naturally for me without needing to break out of the terminal.
Also it's nice that it is a self referential setup that can be easily developed and enhanced right while working on things in Claude Code.
I'm sure many of you are building similar personalized setups.
> The AGENTS.md thing kind of epitomizes the whole reason I decided to quit using Claude Code.
Do I understand correctly that this decision was taken based on something that's not accurate? Claude has been reading AGENTS.md files for a while now.
Claude told me that Anthropic disallows Pi for use with Claude Pro / Max subscription and you have to use API. Is OP then switching to API and credits?
> 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.
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.
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.
Am really happy to see more and more alternatives to Claude and Codex
And I think the biggest reason is what the “open source” models are doing. They are really closing the gap. Don’t get me wrong, the 2 American leaders are still pushing and leading the ai race
But with all the work done from other companies, notably in Asia, there are some alternative solutions : and they start to be really usable as our daily rides
I just wish Europeans would play part of this race - but it seems that we have already decided to sit in our sofa and we watch it sipping some tea.
Does Pi come with an auto mode that blocks dangerous actions? It didn't last time I checked, and these measures are critical to protect prod (and your personal files, etc) from a confused agent.
I gave the harness a try and it is refreshing, but the insistence on staying bare bones and not implementing basic functionality natively, together with no vetting process for popular 3rd party modules, made me return to Claude Code.
I went from Claude Code to Opencode to Pi and never looked back. I also lost interest in closed models and been using open weight ones exclusively since ~January and can hardly be happier.
Pi flexibility is awesome, mostly I use the TUI but I also build this Github action [0] on top of its SDK to enable all sorts of workflows, it's forge agnostic and it works on e.g. Forgejo (that's where I make the most use of it).
Pi also powers Awesome Pi website [1] which I built out of frustration with the at the time state of information around Pi.
Build your own(1.) on top of Pi has worked for me so far. You end up with something that fulfills your personal requirements and suits your workflows. I ended up with a web based ui, multi-session, simple sandboxing to reduce the “oops” factor. It has been a good experience so far. Web seemed like a decent compromise and a working PWA + vpn to access the ui has changed how i work with LLMs; more like a whatsapp chat than a true coding session. Image support has been a big game changer; ask the llm to screenshot and show things makes a huge difference.
1) vibecoded, “works for me” level of stability: https://github.com/randomcodemonkey/autere
I have been using Pi most of this year. Just one problem that's going to make me move to deepseek harness: no subagent support. I am using tintinweb/pi-subagents and it works, but always wondering if there is a better option. It doesn't seem to work right with Herdr's agent status.
I have a plugin for rotating between providers as quota gets used up by altering the model used by the tintiweb subagents. https://github.com/gregwebs/pi-quota-dispatcher
I've been using Cursor for a few years now, and while I'm well aware that it's more expensive, from a UX perspective I am 95% happy. There's still a few things like not being able to move conversations between folders or computers, but big picture, a lot to love. It's just a really coherent dev experience.
When I read what folks write about CC and TUIs it all sounds... really, really awful and I kind of don't get why any wouldn't want to use Cursor. I'm posting this to see if anyone wants to explain how/why I might want to ditch Cursor and go all in on Claude or Codex or Pi or anything else. I'm open to being convinced!
Mostly, I just want to understand. My sense of CC is that it's great for folks who are looking to spend lots of money having 4 agents one-shot an entire application from a single prompt so that they can pick their favourite when they wake up. Is that an absurd perspective? If so, tell me how you use it.
I'm someone working on fairly significant but personal projects; I have a very clear picture in my head about what I'd like to get so I tend to write extremely dense, detail-filled prompts and go through a multi-revision planning phase before kicking off agent mode on a feature. The apps I build tend to be the result of several dozen or several hundred features developed mostly serially, and I am always the bottleneck because of that whole "knowing what I want" thing.
So, that's my usage pattern. Should I be using Claude (or Pi)?
In the experience of the people reading this thread that have gone through the route of implementing their own customized harness with Pi... is is something very time consuming that ends up being a project on itself, or do you actually get time to _do_ things with it?
I'm asking because I tend to spend way too much time working on my tools and not enough time working on product I want to build with the tools... and I'm afraid a custom harness could become another rabbit hole for me.
I've been using pi for several months with herdr. The ability to easily customise your experience via extension, with a small core, has finally made me enjoy working in harnesses. Also check out pi-blackhole (or billion context) + pi-fabric. The former basically gives you unlimited context and pi-fabric is subagents on steroids.
My biggest claude code problem is that it calls git status with fsmonitor turned off via env variables and command line argument and I work on a super big repository.
I'm spawning a lot of agents to work in parallel. I guess I should just use the API, but it just shows that it does some random stuff you might not agree with. 99% of the users are ok with it because they don't have a 10gb repository
I built myself a tool because of the exact same reason:
https://github.com/nickyreinert/yaw/
I was struggeling with multiple markdown files, not only for multiple Claude sessions, but also Copilot and Codex, accross different machines and projects with diferent purposes.
The problem: This is not only about some pre-prompt instructions, its about coding instructions for different lanugages, frameworks and architectures and skill/hooks/tools for different purposes. I drowned in multiple setups (I have ADHD/ASS, I start two projects a week). So I decided to built this kind of "wrapper" that I can use with every new project. It allows me to maintain a global setup of "defaults" and then add modules to each project as I need them.
It's not fully done now, but it already helps me. Someone else might find it useful.
As someone who spends a significant time in the terminal (iterm2), I just have Claude sessions open in tabs when I need it.
My setup is Pycharm, datagrip and iTerm2.
I run all the tests, debugging, linting in the terminal and use the jetbrains gui features which I find useful (some git management basically).
It works great, and this is for building large enterprises applications.
Does Pi support ACP? IIRC claude code (the subscription) cant be used outside claude code or ACP?
The harness doesn't matter as much as what additional value the company behind the harness brings.
Example: claude desktop + projects gives free compute for compilation without any cap (that I've found). So that + opus 5.5 which practically never runs out, it's possible to get thousands of euros worth per month. On Pi/similar, the tokens + compute are metered and it quickly stacks up to something substantially more expensive.
Now this is clearly unsustainable, tip is to milk the cow for as long as it's possible
Feel pretty much the same as the article, but I love Anthropic's models so much that i've stuck with CC for an absurdly long time, and use Pi for literally anything else. Which i think has benefits as well. Can kinda track how well sessions perform and decide on which tools to enable/disable pretty quickly.
It really feels like the usage within CC just goes forever sometimes, and a ton of the stuff i found absurdly annoying are easily disabled tools.
I think it's perfectly fine and healthy to make this choice.
I just don't think it's sustainable. Corporate America, if not global corporations, will insist on code generation through GenAI. It will be a tick in the job requirement.
But if the OP and others can find sustainable employment hand-writing code, that's awesome.
I used CLI in tmux on a VM for a long time until I found https://paseo.sh/ - it's an amazing tool
I am using pi as the minimal coding agent for pc administration, incl. coding up scripts/daemons that help my infrastructure (automatically updating dns when my ISP changes my IP, automating letsencrypt wildcard cert updates and similar stuff). Tested continue.dev, aider, pi, kilocode and opencode for large projects and stuck with opencode for now. I am not fully happy though and hope something better comes along in time. It is just that the annoyances I have with it are not too problematic, I can cope. For some time I also worked with a custom harness I built on top of pi, but that wasn't great either.
I am a CC user on the 20x, 5x is too small for me. Doing some quick maths I found that the Anthropic subscription it is a bargain compared to other models on API usage.
Does using Pi saves you so much token overhead that my maths are wrong?
I use both, and I think Claude Code is easier for beginners but Pi is more interesting to get a better understanding of what the harness is doing for you. Stuff like skills and MCP are sort of abstracted in CC in ways that obfuscate things, probably intentionally, while Pi lets you really see where a model got stuck and why. Inspecting thinking traces and dead ends from local models teaches you a lot about how they work in general.
Comments seem filled with generic fandom for Pi or other harnesses / multiplexers.
The actual post seems incoherent. They had a bunch of problems with Claude, most in features Pi does not even support in the first place. They don't like "instability" aka rapid pace of development, ignoring Pi is just as if not more rapid. They passively assume an ecosystem of plugins is going to be more stable.
I'm a big fan of Pi and believe everyone should use it or similar open harnesses in preference to proprietary / vendor controlled ones. But we need to employ actual cogent, coherent arguments in advocating for that. When a broader audience tries open harnesses and finds out they don't live up to expectations the blow back will be costly.
this article had a lot of why 'not cc' but I didn't see anything about why 'hello Pi'...
Model capability is what harnesses expose, I have experimented with pi using local mlx models - several 27/35B quantisations (Gemma, Qwen, Flint) and the reality is that they are much weaker than Sonnet, let alone Opus. Of course they are "free" (if you have a $3000 mac) but they are slow and dumb, useful for very routine things but comparatively bad at problem solving and trouble shooting.
I haven't used any TUI harness for a couple of months. Actually, I have almost completely stopped using my laptop to run agents since maybe July.
All agents are ephemeral and running remotely now, and my phone has become my primary device to engage with agents.
(I'm using Ampcode and a variant of DeepSeek harness)
Yeah, this post calls out one of the major risks of making it easier to write more software. More features put more cognitive load on your users. If you introduce those new features unobtrusively it might be OK, but if you force it on them, you may lose them as users.
Switching away from Claude Code to OMP (Pi fork) has been good for my mental health.
I can't remember the last time I got frustrated with the continual gaslighting and failure to follow instructions when using OMP as I did on a daily basis when using Claude Code as the harness.
I also have the freedom now to switch models as frequently and often as I like, and have actually been primarily using GPT 6 series models over the last month.
The biggest frustrations with Claude Code were Anthropic's straight-jacketing of the model, its refusal to follow instructions, and its indecipherable output (yes, even with 5.5 series).
Using Pi or a derivative like OMP is a breath of fresh air, it's just a tool again.
Maybe Anthropic could de-program themselves from the Claude religion and come back down to earth at some point.
(Deliberately tooting my own horn) I’ve been on the same path. One of the first frustrations I ran into when migrating away from Claude is that I really missed the ability to create and interact with artifacts. The idea that the products of my conversations was locked away in some frontier AI lab silo bothered me.
I built OpenArtifacts (https://open-artifacts.com) to fix this exact problem. It’s free, open source and trivially self hosted on your own Cloudflare account. I’m releasing a hosted version in the coming days. I’d love to hear what other think.
I switched from Claude Code to Oh My Pi via https://agent-distro.nixos.asia and have never looked back.
On My Pi is what I use for other models too: codex, opencode go, etc.
I don't get why most of these tools are terminal-based, can't they generate a proper UI using AI?
If you still really need closed models, consider a tiered setup: open models on neoclouds (95%) and frontiers for the hardest planning (5%). We've reduced costs dramatically. There's no good argument to use only closed models for most development.
I've been using Claude for almost two years now. Back when everyone was talking about ChatGPT, I installed the Claude Code CLI on my Debian machine.
At that time, Gemini was offering a similar tool, so I decided to compare the two. Honestly, Gemini struggled to generate even a single working function without errors and kept apologising for its mistakes. Claude, on the other hand, was significantly better, even in its early days.
Since then, I haven't switched to another LLM for coding.
Now we're discussing Pi, which supports BYOK. My take is that no third-party alternative can fully replace a native solution, especially when it comes to getting access to new features as soon as they're released. I believe this applies to almost every type of software.
Yes, I'm the same. As for any feature that CC has, you can build it with one prompt with the Pi extension system. For remote control you can just use Cosyra (my app) or one of the other SSH mobile clients.
I'll say that I really enjoy CC's UI - especially when combined with artifacts that I ask CC to make along the way to make decision taking easier...
> 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?
> 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...
I used to use ChatGPT/Claude in the TUI up until like 3 months ago, but my usage of LLMs has exploded - many sessions across many projects. I feel like I outgrew the TUI and now I'm using ChatGPT/Claude desktop. VS Code has become a code review tool and place where I manage git if need be.
The GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, which makes history easier and cleaner to scroll through, also no scrolling bugs, rich text is easier to read with tables, and images integrated into the chat, resources like browsers in the context of the session. Drag and drop session organization (pins), scheduled tasks, etc.. all that in the side bar.
Usually a TUI would be open in VS Code and scoped to whatever repo I'm working with so 10 projects, 10 VS Code instances open, not super scalable. With the GUI desktop app it's one app, and I can start sessions in an repo and switch between them easily, no need to open VS Code for each. I don't see what could make me want to go back to using a TUI.
Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?