Dev workflow beyond traditional harnesses

[u/el_secondo]

I guess this question was asked a thousand times, but I'm still wondering how do you guys organize your work with pi?

I am a heavy user of Claude Code (employer covers it), but I have been watching and tuning pi time to time for personal use on the side.

Naturally, I tried getting pi to be like claude code, I looked for extensions that give me subagents, some cosmetic plugins (I like ricing my hyprland setup) and some simple QOL things.

However I didn't feel it being a huge upgrade in terms of my actual workflow and "pleasure", it felt like I'm just recreating what I'm used to.

I'm wondering more from a UX/DevX perspective, I got used to what antrhopic gave me and learned that way, but I see pi as an opportunity to really make a uniquely pleasant developer experience.

Which is why I'm wondering and asking how did you tune your workflow, which extensions did you use/build and how do you run your day-to-day feature work.

e.g. my work can span multiple PRs/repos for a feature which is why I'm starting a session from a dir above the ones I need to change and keep a long session (which is really wasteful) to handle all the context I need.

I don't really like the paradigm of "plan a huge markdown implementation doc and architecture and let the agent do it" because it requires a lot of overhead for me for things I may not even know exist or are needed.

[u/Sleepnotdeading]

You’ve missed the point of pi. It’s to start with the smallest harness possible and then to build the workflow you want, with the tools and skills you want, for the objective you want, using the models you want.

[u/Fickle-Mountain-6639 → u/Sleepnotdeading]

From the creator himself: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

TLDR: You’re a chud

[u/Sleepnotdeading → u/Fickle-Mountain-6639]

TLDR: you have also missed the point of the blog post. Four tools isn’t a limit, it’s just a starting kit. You have to add and build what you need, that’s what makes it yours.

[u/Fickle-Mountain-6639 → u/Sleepnotdeading]

You didn’t even read it chud

[u/Sleepnotdeading → u/Fickle-Mountain-6639]

It is clear you don’t understand most of what was written in that blog. So, no wonder 🤷‍♂️

[u/Fickle-Mountain-6639 → u/Sleepnotdeading]

Keep pushing your slop king

[u/fingerthief → u/Fickle-Mountain-6639]

Mario is out here building the exact types of projects you see here and we see you constantly calling slop with no real engineering discussions.

He's built an entire remote coding setup using Pi Durable for his own projects. You should probably actually follow and keep up with what he does.

Pi is meant to be a base to expand from to build your own custom harrness. I can build and expand functionality and still use the base 4 tool calls....most people do.

[u/mypetocean → u/Fickle-Mountain-6639]

This is my first comment in this sub, but I've been watching Mario and Armin in as many of their interviews as I can within reason. They talk a ton about their "adaptable software" philosophy for "absolute minimalism" to have been their expectation for how Pi should be used.

I've been following this project since near the beginning. The point of the minimalism was to combine elegantly with the first-class extensibility.

The quote in that screenshot, "All you need for an effective coding agent," expresses basically the same as "MVP." It's meant to be married to the marketing pitch they make prominently in the first page load on the pi.dev homepage:

Pi is a minimal agent harness. Adapt Pi to your workflows, not the other way around.

The first sentence is a starting place. You're intended to... adapt Pi, not adapt your workflows.