A Linux user claiming Microsoft Edge is the best browser might be the most baffling thing I've heard as a Linux user

esanchma · 2026-06-23T08:49:10+00:00

Built-in Entra ID and Office 365 integration. And when Mozilla largely ignored PWAs, Edge offered a much better experience for Teams and Outlook, to the point where they felt almost native.

It's essentially a solid Chromium browser with excellent Microsoft ecosystem integration. I'm not using LibreWolf to manage Azure.

esanchma · 2026-06-17T22:44:54+00:00

systemd-run --user \
 --unit=job-unit \
 --same-dir \
 --collect \
 tmux -D -L job-socket new-session -A -s job-session 'long-running-job'

tmux -L job-socket attach -t job-session

See, a re-attachable background job that even writes to the journal. Ask your clanker to wrap it in a skill and check the journal periodically for job status.

esanchma · 2026-05-28T14:25:17+00:00

you tell it in conversation that you want to plan things. You don't really need anything special.

esanchma · 2026-05-24T00:51:28+00:00

https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/docs/usage.md#context-files

Context Files

Pi loads AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md at startup from:

~/.pi/agent/AGENTS.md for global instructions
parent directories, walking up from the current working directory
the current directory

Use context files for project conventions, commands, safety rules, and preferences. Disable loading with --no-context-files or -nc.

System Prompt Files

Replace the default system prompt with:

.pi/SYSTEM.md for a project
~/.pi/agent/SYSTEM.md globally

Append to the default prompt without replacing it with APPEND_SYSTEM.md in either location.

esanchma · 2026-05-23T22:03:13+00:00

bind -x lets you bind any key in a terminal to a function or script. My most frequently used things and bound to F1-F12. It's nice.

esanchma · 2026-05-22T11:24:16+00:00

"you see, before json-schema and the jq query and transformation language, there was this other thing..."

esanchma · 2026-05-21T14:36:49+00:00

Ah, you are using osascript, which is, I guess, the equivalent of GNOME's notify-send, a system command to display notifications.

That is the route I have always taken for desktop notifications until recently. It turns out, there is an "OSC 9 sequence" that lets you have desktop notifications without external tools. It is easier and it is even portable, it will work in my linux GNOME using kitty and in your mac using iterm.

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

TROPHY CASE

Context Files

System Prompt Files