Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi

caleb.software

176 pointskaragenit98 comments

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?

I just ended up making my own GUI. I never really liked any of the pre-build ones. It started slow (3-4 days of work) and grew organically around my working style. I can also have my preferred UX (e.g., high information density).

Take a look at the Codex App Server or the Claude Agent SDK as a way to communicate with harnesses running headlessly and build your own UI on top. I’m sure Pi can be set up in a similar fashion.

I've been building my own open-source coding agent, VT Code, in Rust.

I wanted more control over the harness itself, especially tool execution, sandboxing, approvals, and context management.

Recently built a native macOS app with GPUI on top of the same agent runloop. It's been interesting exploring how the same engine works across terminal and desktop workflows.

https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode

I thought the TUI was the ultimate power tool and loved the original embrace from claude code. I still use TUI a lot, but have been using deepseek harness web app atop my local model and am already liking the better organization and UI of this interface. I can see my load shifting to it. But you are right, you almost always need a VS Code interface open as well.

The outputs of Opus 5.5 were so much easier to read, but I do find the the deepseek web based tool much easier to comprehend for some reason. Plus I can access it from phone (over tailscale) as well when out and about and continue sessions very easily. AND it is all open source/weights. I'm pretty thrilled, but it's been less than a week.

Claude Web app includes Claude code tab with remote option to work from your own machine (if preferred). I am using it very often.

I have a project folder which is my default environment, and within it I have my many repo clones. That way I can work on any project from my prompt and reference elements in one project to include in another.

I continue to get good results using lifeOS (though I don't use the entire setup) https://github.com/danielmiessler/LifeOS

claude is a terminal-themed gui, not a tui.

I've lost faith in the ChatGPT desktop app. It's nicer than managing a bunch of TUI sessions, but it's so prone to losing session history / context.

The MacOS one has a dreadful startup time as well. I can have the website open in ms but the app takes 7 or 8 seconds

Herdr changed my tui game. Pi but for tmux.

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've only used CC and Pi and the point of pi is to use extensions. Luckily you can write them yourself pretty easily.

I cannot get behind CC is the best harness. Once u switched to pi I knew I was never going back and occasionally I need to use CC for my subscription and find it unpleasant. CC is just this incoherent hodge podge of functionality that seems to have no vision. Subjective, of course.

> 4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);

I'd be curious to know the background around this. At work, I've used @anthropic/Opus 5.5 through Portkey with Pi, and ended up with $10 within less than 10 message exchanges, on a fairly trivial topic. OTOH, when using Claude Code directly with Opus 5.5, I basically spent $30 for a good back-and-forth across a full chat, reaching the point where CC kicked off compaction.

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?

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.

> it because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses.

You're not able to use the API credit and hook it up to another harness?

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/api-credits...

You can PAYG. But it costs an arm and a leg, compared to the subscriptions. Why? Because they're propping up the "moat" that is Claude Code.

API credits yes, subscription no. And the subscription is much better value (per token).

> anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses

they do though?

edit: i guess the parent comment meant subscriptions specifically.

Can I use my max subscription with Pi without Anthropic banning my account?

Can you expand on this? Is there a way to use Claude subscription but not their harness?

No but you can use bb or t3codes etc with it. Not perfect but allows orchestration between harnesses.

So you could make yourself much happier at work by paying the $20 yourself

is pi good if i just want to search through a codebase i don't know with, say, GLM?

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.

Second this, I went from Claude code fighting me all the time and being insanely opaque with its internals to Pi with detailed telemetry about what my agents are actually spending time on. My entire harness is completely custom, and works exactly the way I want it to. Absolutely love Pi

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]

[0] https://github.com/siraben/pi-tool-summaries

I just have a hook that tells agents to echo what they're trying to do. Works fine.

alternatively, you could learn to read it

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.

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.

Anthropic's subscription is the one that has historically been tough to use with other harnesses, where they have (had?) technical safeguards to ensure your subscription usage was limited to Claude Code CLI, with third party harnesses often implementing workarounds or faking it to use your Claude.ai subscription. Nowadays Jetbrains Air does officially allow using your Claude.ai subscription.

But OpenAI's subscription has seemingly always been available to use in other harnesses without trouble.

Yes, you can use your Codex subscription with Pi without any limitations. It supports Codex out of the box. You may need to install extensions for things like tracking usage and limit resets though. Pi only provides basic Codex integration.

Yes. You can and it's easy to test. I'd also encourage you to try local models with it as well.

Pi/opencode apparently make 10% already of all traffic already:

https://manifest.build/blog/chatgpt-plus-tokens-third-party-...

Using your subscription in 3rd party tools is explicitly allowed for Codex, and disallowed but not really enforced for Claude. There are extensions for Pi that allow you to log in with your Claude credentials, Codex is iirc even built-in.

There is no stick unlike Anthropic (along with insisting on signing commits and "don't abuse the robot" the reason I started to use OpenAI instead of Anthropic --- not that I am under the illusion they are any less evil overall) but I think now there is starting to be a carrot towards Codex usage since there sessions are "cached forever". I assume if you use Pi you get 12 hours of cache instead.

Yes and no. Any harness can use the subscription but must go through `claude -p` mode, which is more limited.

Why do you need to use claude to use a codex subscription with pi?

He assumed the original commenter meant claude, because Anthropic's the only provider that imposes the strict limitations on subscription use.

This, IMO, is one big selling point of Codex for me. The are much more accepting of usage outside of the Codex harness, and make it trivial to set up.

Yes, it is allowed and supported normally by pi and others.

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.

[0] https://github.com/earendil-works/pi-claude-code

Is that still needed now that Agent SDK usage is included in subscriptions?

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

  Update October 7, 2026: Claude Max, Ultra, and Team plans now include monthly API credits. They cover the Claude API, Claude Managed Agents, and the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p when you run them with an API key from your linked Claude Console organization. Nothing changes for your plan: when you’re signed in with your Claude plan, the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p still draw from your subscription limits.

EDIT: I was mistaken. pi uses @anthropic-ai/sdk (the client for the Messages API), not @anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk (the Agent SDK).

The Agent SDK is using the Claude Code harness. The point of using Pi is to avoid using that harness entirely. It wouldn’t make sense to use the Agent SDK in Pi; you would essentially be driving a harness with another harness.

If you’ve used Codex before, then the Agent SDK is Anthropic’s equivalent of the Codex App Server, which is Codex running headlessly with a protocol to talk to it.

Does Pi support that natively?

Yes, in the sense that Ant credits some number of dollars worth of API tokens to your account and Pi has long been happy to use an Ant API key

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

> 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.

Switched to DeepSeek Harness recently, their new Creator Mode is amazing: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/s/sxg7aAM6rS

X link for people who don’t use Reddit:

https://x.com/DeepSeekHarness/status/2117256196227019194

Lol at the idea that X is somehow more user-friendly than Reddit

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.

Well yeah, the whole point of pi is that you build it to your workflow. If you dislike the entire point of a project, it’s not for you. I run my agents in a sandbox. When Claude or Codex then double sandbox themselves, it gets really annoying.

gotgenes/pi-permission-system and the ai-guard authorizer can do a lot here, it feels very similar to cc auto mode.

I built a policy authorizer on top of pi-permission-system that looks kinda like nftables that models commands/subcommands/options as read/write and enfores policies depending on if the sub agent is read only or write, which really cuts down on the stupid decisions and nicely complements AI cmd review. Pi shines for making things like that possible.

like the auto mode classifier? if it doesn't then... that's a risky tradeoff

You'd have to install an extension or write a function that intercepts tool calls.

You have time to watch over your agents?

Sounds to me like it isnt basic functionality if it all works ;)

> bear bones

*bare

ty, edited

There are a ton of choices when it comes to coding harnesses - Pi being just one of them.

DeepSeek harness for example seemed really powerful when I tried it.

I'm using Cecli which started life as an Aider fork..

Claude code may still be a good choice as long as they have Opus

Does it speak a more understandable dialect of English? "Claudish" is a minor meme at this point.

> 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?

It’s not that unreasonable, or at least wasn’t a few years ago. I complained about the Chatgpt Pro $200 not allowing basically unlimited image generation (the limits were super low) a couple years ago and the next day Sam Altman tweeted asking about switching up how they handle Pro plans and putting usage into a single pool (which is what they moved to). If he didn’t read my email directly the gist at least got to him.

'Tis a joke. His landing page says he's a dev at Salesforce, so I presume not famous.

I’m definitely not famous :^) thanks for reading!

>> 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?

I think that was tongue in cheek. And by that I don't mean the author's tongue was actually in his cheek.

I also think it went over your head. And by that I don't mean I think it literally went over your head.

It's clearly a joke, but I can forgive some people for taking it literally, given the impact that certain well-known devs have on other companies' decision-making. It's a common enough line that it's plausible this could have been a VIP whose opinions swayed a company. Not him and not Anthropic, of course, but it does happen.

I wouldn’t even say not Anthropic, Boris is soliciting recommendations for Claude Code right now in the secrets exposure thread. Hardly implausible

I can't believe you didn't pick up on the sarcasm in the GP's comment...

While I agree the sarcasm is obvious, important to remember sarcasm doesnt really translate well if english is not your first language, and notoriously does not translate well online regardless, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

> 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...

Alternatively, what you’re seeing is continuous hill climbing and optimisations based on large scale experiments and simulated rollouts.

For me personally, I don’t use Claude Code because I can’t read the source.

At least with Codex, I know there’s a bunch of telemetry and all that, but I can have my agent inspect the source and have relatively greater confidence it’s not implanting spyware onto my machine, because a classifier thinks I’m working for Deepseek or something.

They're hill climbing by changing their system prompt... That's not how thats done.

They're changing system prompts to control how users use their llms.

Until it's inevitably replaced of course

I think Anthropic is working on allowing AGENTS.md files as well. However, Claude.md files take precedence if present. If not, you fall back to AGENTS.md.

Claude now supports AGENTS.md fully but the rest of what you said holds

It has since 9/16, however folks soon realized it supports AGENTS.md, but not .agents/skills.

This is such an important detail the main issue for this was closed and then reopened with an expanded title:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/31005

The whole AGENTS vs CLAUDE md issue was bound to be resolved. If the models are getting smarter and harnesses getting better - how could you have a product so dumb that it ignores whatever skills, instructions, references, other things that are part of the folder context it is mounted in.

Having claude code ignore agents.md just made it seem dumb. At this point, you probably don't need either.

> At this point, you probably don't need either.

There's only so much stuff I have the patience to tell it in a session before I write it down somewhere.

"Write down the rules I told you in CLAUDE.md"

bbapp is legitimately good too

Pi is awesome until compaction hits. I think one in every two compactions it’s failed on me ie didn’t know how to continue :(

I never really rely on compaction. Instead, I instruct the coding agents to maintain a handoff markdown document across sessions. Ymmv.

What about if you’ve given a plan that will take hours? How do you tell how to auto-compact since it can’t read its own environment?

Try pi-vcc or pi-blackhole

Thanks! I’ve taken a look at Blackhole before but it looks way to complicated for what I wanted. I’ll check out VCC. Thanks again!

> It seems like there isn’t someone high-up whose job is strictly to say “no” to these requests, which is incredibly important when it comes to product engineering

Ah, product management - we know so few of ye who know what you're doing.

I get 150 tokens/sec on my coding agent, if you are on a MacBook, thats with an M1

try kapitsa as the inference engine with pi as the harness

It works really well

Man, my M1 Pro unfortunately only has 16GB of RAM; it has been such a limiter to using local models. I'll give kapitsa a try, I see I should be able to squeeze some smaller models on

kapitsa is customized well to just a small selection of models that are in vogue right now, focusing on qwen and nemotron

compared to llama.cpp that tries to cater to all but does so only averagely

check the catalogue and see if one of the quantizations fit

Anecdotally I run semi nightly harness and local model test runs, and opencode consistently outperforms ohmypi on various code bench tasks.

Note though that this for local models that can run on a 5090, so, kinda dumb models with a small context window. Also they might perform differently on a custom pi setup rather than the very feature rich ohmypi.

Mostly the runs just cause me to get decision fatigue so I typically just use opencode and let a frontier model choose whatever cheaper models it wants to orchestrate with, so long as it's one that's not on the same token budget.

P.S. I'd always wondered who it was that got caleb.software before I could... Outshot in a western duel!

Alas Opencode's source is hideous to read.

When you say "kinda dumb" it's worth noting that the smaller coding models tend not to actually need system prompts to be helpful coding assistants, etc. Qwen maybe more than Muse Glimmer? I've not tested Qwen 3.8 27B enough yet. Even Gemma 4 didn't seem to need much.

Muse Glimmer is so absolutely tuned for one particular pattern (turn-by-turn agentic coding and assistance) that it will do it more or less without a prompt at all (except to set the reasoning level maybe). Beyond the tools announcement, it feels to me like it almost only needs a prompt to do plan mode stuff. If LM Studio (in either of its forms) or Unsloth Desktop had proper support for running inside a linux container rather than just a filesystem sandbox, you'd barely need a dedicated coding agent at all. Osaurus gets even closer.

I wanted to like Opencode but I can't, really. I am enjoying Pi slightly more because it's just way less convoluted and obscure.

FWIW I use Paseo for the GUI, which to some extent eliminates that aspect of decision fatigue; if you like Paseo's UI well enough, you can have it with almost any harness. And since it can connect to its daemon via ssh you can still have the desktop GUI with a container. (Not clear to me if Opencode v2 Desktop makes remote connections to the daemon or just wraps the web interface like v1 did)

I do not know how it is with Glimmer, but other Facebook models (Muse and whatever is currently hiding under "Crouton") sure love ignoring direct instructions to do or not do something important (like not using particular broken/inefficient tools). Doesn't matter if it's repeated ten times in screaming caps, they'll still ignore it at least sometimes.

No other model I've used does this.

Opencode's system prompt is much smaller than omp. Smaller models may not work well just because of this. Also omp is not pi.

ohmypi is not pi, it's based on pi, but it's not pi.

I mean... sure, yeah.

But this feels like six weeks (or more) out-of-date. And so it is - from mid-September. And I know that observing such a thing sounds bizarre and teenage, but that's kind of a long time right now; we're at a moment in history when things are moving fast.

We're not really fully ready for the traffic TBH, but for those who few of you choose to click, this is what we've been doing with pi lately:

https://magenta.cryptograss.live/

Made me click, but I have no idea what this is supposed to be.

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