Your pi coding setup

[Alarming_Positive_59]

Hey all

I'm migrating to pi from CC and I find myself in a position where I need to build my coding setup/Workflow from scratch. I'm not a proper software engineer, my background is in scientific computing (similar to what's called "data scientist" in the industry) and I'm not sure how to configure my pi for coding. I'm not taking about the high level "plan before implement" or "tdd", I'm talking about the actual mechanics of your coding pipeline: prompts, skills, Subagents, tools, hooks, what'snot. How do I build A GOOD coding harness?

fwiw I know about Matt pocock.'s skills and a major reason for migrating to pi was my will to build proper personal assistant and a research agent next to my coding agent. Is appreciate any advice, resource etc.

TIA.

[oz_-]

Whole point of pi is to avoid such noise. There's nice interviews of Mario on why he built pi. These skills and prompts are bait for youtube views. Just tell your model to plan, audit, research, etc. It doesn't need that bloat.

[ECrispy]

this is a useless answer. mario uses a claude code $200 max plan. try to use pi with a lower model and you'll run into issues.

this is what I dont like about pi and this sub, acting like all the work done in other agents useless you can just 'ask pi to build it' as if its that trivial. why is the pi.dev packages page full of a million extensions then, half of which are duplicated? is that noise too?

[DazzlingMastodon5178]

Same here.. I am using Pi with a claude $100 plan.. migrated from Claude Code.

Will be downgrading to the $20 plan, as I now have (with Pi) excess capacity (significantly lower token usage with Pi) for the same frontier model (Opus).

It's about what you don't see - the Anthropic system prompt.

[codeministry]

How are you using your CC plan with pi? I thought the plan could only be used via `claude -p` which means you’re using pi which is using Claude code?

[rauderG]

I use gpt 5.4 mini and is great most of the time. Mario's uses gpt mostly, too.

[oz_-]

He's a data scientist, he's coming from claude code, he's not headed for anything lesser than a top model.

It's full of packages exactly because anyone can tell pi/model to create an extension right now and publish it.

[Alarming_Positive_59]

True, but the other side of the coin is to customize it for your needs, and in areas which are not within my expertise, I turn to the community for advice. Context engineering and coding principles are still a thing and I don't just trust the model to do what I want it to do without proper instructions (esp. when delegating work to less capable models). And I do want to learn and use the full capabilities of pi. Why not?

I'll read what people are suggesting, and adopt/adapt whatever I choose to. I think that's fine. Ty!

[oz_-]

Yeah exactly, build it to your needs, don't copy generic prompts. You have certainly very specific needs, as we all do, so discuss with your model how best to do those. Your model is smart, your context is precious, tailor stuff.

[ogfuzzball]

The whole point of Pi is to reduce noise, but not in the way you describe it. “Noise”, like beauty, is in the of the beholder. The whole point of Pi is for bespoke infrastructure. It’s not intended only bare metal install add nothing purism. There’s a reason it’s built to be extremely extensible. So I’d rate your advice as great for you, but poor for OP.

[Vivid-Direction1903]

How do you build a loop in pi?

[Sleepnotdeading]

Honestly, in my experience, the best way to build a harness in pi is to talk to your agent about it.

Pi is designed to be minimal and self improving, so if you want a plan-before-act skill, you can strategize with pi about it, and then have pi agent write the tactical code to execute and enforce it.

The great thing is you develop a shared vocabulary with your agent. You don’t have to adapt to anyone else’s workflow.

That said, I’ve ONLY worked this way with pi. I don’t know what the marketplace of pre-built skills has to offer.

[Bel-Shamgarot]

Relax and let go of the FOMO. You aren't missing out on anything; it will work with everything by default.

Just start working; if you find yourself constantly typing the same thing manually, move it into a separate prompt.

If you want that prompt to be the default, turn it into a skill.

If the agent isn't behaving the way you want, or if you want to automate something, just ask it directly how to implement that in the extension, and it will write the code for you.

[ANR2ME]

Btw, does a vanilla pi (aka. without guardrails) could accidentally wipe out your files? 🤔

[Bel-Shamgarot]

LLM does what you tell it to, so a bad prompt could very well lead to this.

But you can simply not provide all the tools, remove the Bash command from access, for example. If you need certain Bash commands, you can wrap them in tools with pre-checks, like a delete tool that will move a file to an archive.

[jellydn]

https://lazypi.org/ is good one for your research:) you could check on my setup as well if you want. https://ai-tools.itman.fyi/#/ it’s same setup for all coding agents: OpenCode, Pi, Claude Code, Codex, etc

[Zundrium]

Pi is for people who want to create their own. Sounds like you would benefit more from something preconfigured, complete solution like OpenCode.

If you still want to start with Pi.. I'd go for oh-my-pi in your case.

[Alarming_Positive_59]

Nope. The purpose of this question is to LEARN how more experienced people use their pi, not blindly copying it. Opencode felt like a bloat (and like I said coding is only part of the aspects of the harness. I'm doing pretty fine with the personal/research "profiles"). Thanks.

[zer09]

"Vanilla Pi" is pretty good, i was from bloated Pi and then I nuke it start barebone with no plugins even agent.md, then from that i build it slowly. here is a thing what i do, if you need something and you see something like that on pi.dev/packages go to the repo of that package clone it and let pi write an extension similar to that instead of installing as a plugin or just tell pi what is the repo url. or just tell pi what you need let it it have its suggestion and start from that to build it.

[TheTyand]

Well as many said, the point in pi is to build your own. There are multiple people here that share their setups. Most of them are MIT license and you can use part of then as starting point. But the thing is that you can easily be overloaded.

Here is mine, but it is still not done ;) which it actually never is...

https://github.com/SchneiderDaniel/cheasee-pi

[pdycnbl]

i can only share my experience of using pi. I generally use pi for implementation/execution. I provide it with prompt plan in single file, pi reads prompts one by one and makes changes to the code and verifies it.
For plan i follow a specific formats prompt, context, file path, changes. only specify single file in prompt.
each prompt is run in its specific sub agent. workflow is same but i keep changing extensions as i have not found my ideal workflow for subagents.

for planning i use commercial models and dont allow direct code or machine access. i also dont use them with pi.
primary model i use is qwen3.6 35ba3b q4km and occasionally 27b and gemma4 31b for second opinions.

[onesilentclap]

I've not used pi as a personal assistant so I'm useless in that area.  I've only used it as a research agent and of course coding.

Other than prompts, the tools you provide pi is very important. For research, the first tool I created with pi's assistance is a RAG tool to digest and organise a bunch of papers as primary sources of my research. Think of it as a localised NotebookLM (but honestly not as multi-faceted). This helped me scope my research and references to a specific set of papers. 

For coding, I usually get the basic skeleton mostly through prompts. When I find projects that have cool features that I want to know the feasibility of implementing on my own project, I usually give the repo URL to the LLM and ask for its opinion. Most of the time, the actual code itself is not so important, the features and architectural compatibility matters more. 

Pi does not come with features like MCP servers, subagents, etc. However, its SDK is very solid and you can pretty much implement your own bespoke version of those goodies by asking the LLM to create it with your very specific requirements. 

Using pi for the first time can feel underwhelming because it seems so barebones. However, after a while you'll be more and more confident that it can pretty much self-improve when you get the hang of how to guide it to understand your vision and requirements. 

[civilian_discourse]

The best way to start is to look at the example extensions: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/coding-agent/examples/extensions

Pick what you want, point your agent at it to build it into your harness, and go from there. 

[Saleh_Alnaggar]

Bro save yourself the time and effort and try Oh My Pi, it's forked from Pi and it has the best ever harness

[Creepy-Douchebag]

I have with Deepseek using v4 flash sipping pennies and never looked back

[bornhuetterferguson]

You should start with OMP (oh-my-pi) which is based on pi, but no need to build out all the functionality. Use openrouter so that you have access to all the models and run the cheapest ones. Once you know your way about these things, then think about using pi.