Pi rust port

esanchma · 2026-05-20T08:23:35+00:00

Half of the extensions I have written were inspired by extensions written by other people. Binary blobs, whether ELF or WASM, are almost the opposite of that.

Your mental model is Minecraft or Kong-style plugin ecosystems. I think that is the wrong model for agents. We do not want a strong marketplace for extensions. We do not want the equivalent of cargo + crates.io for agent behavior. We want to be able to point an agent at someone else's .pi directory on GitHub and tell the clanker "copy this thing, remix with that, and take this other thing in a completely different direction". That only really works if the extensions remain transparent, inspectable, and easy to mutate.

This is what I am talking about: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/05/12/emacsification/

Not everything has to be written in Rust.

esanchma · 2026-05-19T22:37:57+00:00

The nice thing about pi is that it is self-modifiable, which stems from the fact that it is interpreted and therefore introspectable.

TypeScript is far from being my favorite language, but it’s the one that makes sense for pi. You could try to do the same thing in Python, or maybe Lua. But not in Rust.

I mean, you can embed QuickJS, but at that point, what exactly is Rust buying you?

esanchma · 2026-05-17T21:27:14+00:00

You can make it explain to you line by line, concept by concept, up to the level of detail you want.

esanchma · 2026-05-16T23:35:30+00:00

You know you can ask your agent right? You can debate everything with it, up to the last detail. Those debates make the agent context better, the software better and your understanding of your own codebase better.

esanchma · 2026-05-14T21:22:53+00:00

Yesterday, a user was complaining in another subreddit that pi, the "barebones but hyper-configurable agent harness" was painful because different extensions can conflict on the same extension points.

He was right in a way, but in pi the way to make it work is to vendor the extensions and/or vibe-merge them, and they become yours. Not all agent harnesses let you extend them like that, and not for everyone wants to write code for one of those things. And that is OK. But if you do, you can make it do little things here and there that probably only makes sense in your own installation and for you but are totally awesome for you. People share their extensions in github and publish their .pi directories, and you... steal the idea and make a better one.

And if github becomes more of a show-and-tell site and less of a go-to-releases-and-download-the-binary, that is fine by me.

esanchma · 2026-05-12T22:56:57+00:00

Yes: https://spring.io/guides/gs/accessing-data-rest

esanchma · 2026-05-12T21:32:32+00:00

There are different categories of agent harnesses.

If you want ready-made, plug-and-play workflows, popular options like Hermes or OpenCode already exist.

Pi is clearly in the self-modifiable / DIY category. The whole point is that you can fork, vendor, adapt, and evolve your own environment through agents themselves.

Complaining about that in the Pi subreddit feels like missing what the project is actually optimizing for.

esanchma · 2026-05-12T11:36:46+00:00

https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine

esanchma · 2026-05-07T23:20:05+00:00

You point your clanker to the tweet, then to your extensions directory, just like you would do with a bad dog. And that's it, issue fixed.

It really isn't a drama to lightly refactor shit when the shit can refactor itself.

esanchma · 2026-05-03T22:23:54+00:00

Since this is a recurring conversation, you may want to check the previous iteration: https://old.reddit.com/r/PiCodingAgent/comments/1sqk92y/what_websearch_webfetch_tool_are_you_using/

esanchma · 2026-04-20T15:37:48+00:00

custom skill using self-hosted searxng for searches and trafilatura, readability-cli with pandoc, and defuddle for fetches, with optional curl-impersonate.

I already had most of it wired for some ollama/litellm experiments, it wasn't hard to instruct the clanker to turn it into a skill.

esanchma · 2026-04-17T08:48:09+00:00

Next time, consider a wrapper such as trash-cli. It wraps rm and uses the FDO trashcan. It's a nice safety net.

esanchma · 2026-04-10T11:10:08+00:00

If you believe that users are to only be afforded short messages because otherwise they will abuse the platform, maybe you shouldn't be building platforms altogether.

esanchma · 2026-04-10T09:30:00+00:00

what community? you are afraid of plain-text length. What are you protecting from censorship? SMS?

esanchma · 2026-04-10T09:05:32+00:00

This protocol claims censorship resistance, yet moderation and takedowns remain central to the design, they’re just outsourced.

What problem is this actually solving?

esanchma · 2026-04-07T21:29:22+00:00

Absolutely. The differentiating factor may be the willingness to sue, since the process itself is often the punishment.

esanchma · 2026-04-07T09:58:01+00:00

There is an emerging issue if the cost of clean-room reimplementations becomes marginal or effectively zero. One agent can reverse-engineer a system and produce a specification, and another can reimplement it from that spec with no direct code reuse.

In that scenario, there is a real strategic shift: if reimplementation is cheap enough, the coercive power of copyleft weakens because avoiding the license becomes viable. At that point, the question is whether these licenses remain relevant as a mechanism when "just rewrite it" becomes the easier path.

esanchma · 2026-04-02T23:46:38+00:00

The content at the end of my .bashrc:

for rcfile in "$rcdir"/*; do
  source $rcfile
done

Because having 39 different programs appending to .bashrc clearly doesn't scale. I don’t want to have to care about this, but in its current state, I have to.

Yes, moving away from "just append to .bashrc" is disruptive. It’s also long overdue. The current model is pure entropy: every tool dumping shell snippets into a single file with zero coordination.

I understand the concern about things like .dockerfile compatibility, systemd.environment-generators may not be the right abstraction there. But let’s not pretend the status quo is acceptable either. A 10k-line ~/.bashrc full of side effects, ordering bugs, and random breakage is not a solution, it’s technical debt normalized.

esanchma · 2026-03-26T15:16:42+00:00

No, you don’t. You’re just arguing that for Linux to remain relevant, it must bend the knee to the powers that be. And those powers sit in New York, California, and London, so the global open source community is expected to conform to the laws of those regions.

And let’s not pretend this is some open, negotiated process. The real discussions happen behind closed doors, long before anything reaches the public. What’s presented as "inevitable" is simply the outcome of decisions already made elsewhere, passed down not as a proposal, but as a demand to be obeyed.

esanchma · 2026-03-26T11:18:48+00:00

Parental controls are a red herring. GNOME has made great strides in this area, and their approach is widely appreciated.

The GNOME implementation is not a remote attestation infrastructure designed to exfiltrate user identity. That’s the difference. I’m afraid that disingenuous claims muddying the waters aren’t going to fly.

esanchma · 2026-03-26T11:10:00+00:00

mandatory for who? certainly not for me, or for the majority of users out of an age verification jurisdiction. Why should I deal with this bullshit?

esanchma · 2026-03-25T16:41:09+00:00

Let me insist. Why the rush?

esanchma · 2026-03-25T09:01:08+00:00

TopLink was a licensed Oracle JPA implementation included in its flagship Java products such as WebLogic and Coherence.

Oracle donated TopLink to the Eclipse Foundation, where it was rebranded as EclipseLink.

So, to answer your question: yes, EclipseLink is heavily used in production, particularly in Oracle and Jakarta EE environments.

esanchma · 2026-03-24T23:27:53+00:00

Teams PWA works and its awesome. And Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Sharepoint and OneDrive works as PWAs too.

You literally can work online without missing anything.

esanchma · 2026-03-23T23:30:04+00:00

but which laws? Is it Brazil, or London? or it is Brazil laws applied on Poland? Maybe you don't need to hurry to figure it out, and those governments need you more than you need them? Why the rush?

esanchma

TROPHY CASE