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've been using Claude for almost two years now. Back when everyone was talking about ChatGPT, I installed the Claude Code CLI on my Debian machine.

At that time, Gemini was offering a similar tool, so I decided to compare the two. Honestly, Gemini struggled to generate even a single working function without errors and kept apologising for its mistakes. Claude, on the other hand, was significantly better, even in its early days.

Since then, I haven't switched to another LLM for coding.

Now we're discussing Pi, which supports BYOK. My take is that no third-party alternative can fully replace a native solution, especially when it comes to getting access to new features as soon as they're released. I believe this applies to almost every type of software.

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.

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.

> The AGENTS.md thing kind of epitomizes the whole reason I decided to quit using Claude Code.

Do I understand correctly that this decision was taken based on something that's not accurate? Claude has been reading AGENTS.md files for a while now.

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

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.

I’ve been using Pi since April. I switched from using copilot CLI which definitely isn’t the most frontier harness going but was more “feature rich” at the time than the stripped down feature set you get with Pi out the box.

The bit I was instantly drawn to was how much access you are given to change every part of it. Its similar to the text buffer in emacs where every cell in the buffer is fully accessible to any edits you need to make. My configurations are fairly minimal, but for instance I match the accept cli calls that could be destructive and edits to files in the same way copilot is set up.

Currently my pi config turns it into a tutor. It no longer makes edits, just advises and is designed to teach. I make all the code edits by hand. Use deepseek flash with it because its stupid cheap. It works for me, but honestly you can set up pi in any way you want which is why I personally think its the best harness by virtue of anything being possible as long as you can dream it up!

The author is complaining about Claude Code inside VSCode. The complaints don’t apply to the Claude Desktop App, for the most part. You don’t need VSCode to review code, just use the Claude app which has good support already. And if you’re moving to Pi, maybe use it with ThinkRail, from JetBrains. It’s my favorite harness since it can do everything I want: multiple models including local, focus on reviewing code after the agents are done, uses worktrees by default. And it adds some nifty tools for designing software which I am really enjoying. One thing it can’t do is let you edit files :) but that is ok, in the rare case I write something I use emacs, thank God no more need for a heavy IDE!

I built a Claude Code mod that displays a dashboard linking issues/PRs to claude sessions and allowing me to organize my work more around activities, such as reviewing, working on issues, fixing PRs, developing specs and ad hoc sessions. As someone coming from a vim in tmux, keyboard only workflow, this works most naturally for me without needing to break out of the terminal.

Also it's nice that it is a self referential setup that can be easily developed and enhanced right while working on things in Claude Code.

I'm sure many of you are building similar personalized setups.

The harness doesn't matter as much as what additional value the company behind the harness brings.

Example: claude desktop + projects gives free compute for compilation without any cap (that I've found). So that + opus 5.5 which practically never runs out, and it's possible to get thousands of euros worth per month. On Pi/similar, the tokens + compute are metered and it quickly stacks up to something substantially more expensive.

Now this is clearly unsustainable, tip is to milk the cow for as long as it's possible

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?

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

Yeah, this post calls out one of the major risks of making it easier to write more software. More features put more cognitive load on your users. If you introduce those new features unobtrusively it might be OK, but if you force it on them, you may lose them as users.

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

I switched from Claude Code to Oh My Pi via https://agent-distro.nixos.asia and have never looked back.

On My Pi is what I use for other models too: codex, opencode go, etc.

Build your own(1.) on top of Pi has worked for me so far. You end up with something that fulfills your personal requirements and suits your workflows. I ended up with a web based ui, multi-session, simple sandboxing to reduce the “oops” factor. It has been a good experience so far. Web seemed like a decent compromise and a working PWA + vpn to access the ui has changed how i work with LLMs; more like a whatsapp chat than a true coding session. Image support has been a big game changer; ask the llm to screenshot and show things makes a huge difference.

1) vibecoded, “works for me” level of stability: https://github.com/randomcodemonkey/autere

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.

I haven't used any TUI harness for a couple of months. Actually, I have almost completely stopped using my laptop to run agents since maybe July.

All agents are ephemeral and running remotely now, and my phone has become my primary device to engage with agents.

(I'm using Ampcode and a variant of DeepSeek harness)

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.

I've been using Cursor for a few years now, and while I'm well aware that it's more expensive, from a UX perspective I am 95% happy. There's still a few things like not being able to move conversations between folders or computers, but big picture, a lot to love. It's just a really coherent dev experience.

When I read what folks write about CC and TUIs it all sounds... really, really awful and I kind of don't get why any wouldn't want to use Cursor. I'm posting this to see if anyone wants to explain how/why I might want to ditch Cursor and go all in on Claude or Codex or Pi or anything else. I'm open to being convinced!

Mostly, I just want to understand. My sense of CC is that it's great for folks who are looking to spend lots of money having 4 agents one-shot an entire application from a single prompt so that they can pick their favourite when they wake up. Is that an absurd perspective? If so, tell me how you use it.

I'm someone working on fairly significant but personal projects; I have a very clear picture in my head about what I'd like to get so I tend to write extremely dense, detail-filled prompts and go through a multi-revision planning phase before kicking off agent mode on a feature. The apps I build tend to be the result of several dozen or several hundred features developed mostly serially, and I am always the bottleneck because of that whole "knowing what I want" thing.

So, that's my usage pattern. Should I be using Claude (or Pi)?

> 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.

Yes, I'm the same. As for any feature that CC has, you can build it with one prompt with the Pi extension system. For remote control you can just use Cosyra (my app) or one of the other SSH mobile clients.

I have been using Pi most of this year. Just one problem that's going to make me move to deepseek harness: no subagent support. I am using tintinweb/pi-subagents and it works, but always wondering if there is a better option. It doesn't seem to work right with Herdr's agent status.

I have a plugin for rotating between providers as quota gets used up by altering the model used by the tintiweb subagents. https://github.com/gregwebs/pi-quota-dispatcher

I built myself a tool because of the exact same reason:

https://github.com/nickyreinert/yaw/

I was struggeling with multiple markdown files, not only for multiple Claude sessions, but also Copilot and Codex, accross different machines and projects with diferent purposes.

The problem: This is not only about some pre-prompt instructions, its about coding instructions for different lanugages, frameworks and architectures and skill/hooks/tools for different purposes. I drowned in multiple setups (I have ADHD/ASS, I start two projects a week). So I decided to built this kind of "wrapper" that I can use with every new project. It allows me to maintain a global setup of "defaults" and then add modules to each project as I need them.

It's not fully done now, but it already helps me. Someone else might find it useful.

As someone who spends a significant time in the terminal (iterm2), I just have Claude sessions open in tabs when I need it.

My setup is Pycharm, datagrip and iTerm2.

I run all the tests, debugging, linting in the terminal and use the jetbrains gui features which I find useful (some git management basically).

It works great, and this is for building large enterprises applications.

I use both, and I think Claude Code is easier for beginners but Pi is more interesting to get a better understanding of what the harness is doing for you. Stuff like skills and MCP are sort of abstracted in CC in ways that obfuscate things, probably intentionally, while Pi lets you really see where a model got stuck and why. Inspecting thinking traces and dead ends from local models teaches you a lot about how they work in general.

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

I've been using pi for several months with herdr. The ability to easily customise your experience via extension, with a small core, has finally made me enjoy working in harnesses. Also check out pi-blackhole (or billion context) + pi-fabric. The former basically gives you unlimited context and pi-fabric is subagents on steroids.

isn’t the point of CC the subsidized tokens of the pro/max accounts?

the tool descriptions and system prompts are notoriously overcooked but you can work around it with careful config; my startup context in CC is 10k, and i could have pruned it way more if i had wanted to be aggressive about it.

I am a CC user on the 20x, 5x is too small for me. Doing some quick maths I found that the Anthropic subscription it is a bargain compared to other models on API usage.

Does using Pi saves you so much token overhead that my maths are wrong?

(Deliberately tooting my own horn) I’ve been on the same path. One of the first frustrations I ran into when migrating away from Claude is that I really missed the ability to create and interact with artifacts. The idea that the products of my conversations was locked away in some frontier AI lab silo bothered me.

I built OpenArtifacts (https://open-artifacts.com) to fix this exact problem. It’s free, open source and trivially self hosted on your own Cloudflare account. I’m releasing a hosted version in the coming days. I’d love to hear what other think.

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.

If you still really need closed models, consider a tiered setup: open models on neoclouds (95%) and frontiers for the hardest planning (5%). We've reduced costs dramatically. There's no good argument to use only closed models for most development.

pi is pretty great. Bit unfortunately that it is built on a node stack too, but seems to at least be executed well

Model capability is what harnesses expose, I have experimented with pi using local mlx models - several 27/35B quantisations (Gemma, Qwen, Flint) and the reality is that they are much weaker than Sonnet, let alone Opus. Of course they are "free" (if you have a $3000 mac) but they are slow and dumb, useful for very routine things but comparatively bad at problem solving and trouble shooting.

what about the API cost doesn't it way expensive than the Claude or any other LLM provider monthly subscriptions ?

I don't get why most of these tools are terminal-based, can't they generate a proper UI using AI?

From the article’s footnotes:

  If you assume 1 million DAU and 100M requests per day, trimming 1,000 tokens off of [the over-long system prompt] could literally save millions of dollars in inference costs per year

That should be corrected to “could literally lose millions of dollars in inference revenue per year”, which also goes some way toward explaining why it doesn’t happen.

> 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...

> 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'll say that I really enjoy CC's UI - especially when combined with artifacts that I ask CC to make along the way to make decision taking easier...

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

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..

most of the time, claude gui or codex gui is good enough. this is for people doing beyond reasonable work on edge cases.

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.

Until it's inevitably replaced of course

Where do you buy your tokens when using Pi?

Pi users : what do you think of Mistral Vibe ?

Is it just me or has Opus 5.5 on High been disappointing for the last week or so? It's been making a lot of silly mistakes, bash issues and killing it's own shell much more than usual.

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

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 :(

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!

> In spite of all of these existing issues, it seems like Anthropic has worked at a feverish pace to pack more features into Claude Code without much care for quality or stability

To me this is why AI-pilled orgs or groups won't win.

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

I have tried Pi, but at this point I'm using a fleet of hermes agents to connect realtime via webrtc to a custom web dashboard (written in rust) that works on multiple projects/tasks atomically and simultaneously and compiles/tests locally and then submits to a private central git with all its changes and then pushes to dev for testing, then prod. The agents working on tasks can request new tasks and a supervisor is configured for each project that does a scheduled review and proposes recommendations based on what has been done and needs to be done based on the project plan...As new agents come online they can be quickly enrolled. It works well when you're working on many projects simultaneously. Its also a good use for a stack of 10 old laptops.

Pi is awesome!

Unfortunately I have to use Claude Code at work, and it is a very frustrating experience, I constantly find myself trying to bend it to my will. I sometimes suspect that my distaste for Claude Code is one of the reasons of my distaste for Claude as well.

Pi on the other hand is a joy to use. Top notch session and model management, excellent conversation tree/branching functionality, and it lives up to its philosophy of being meant to be adapted to your workflow.

I can't recommend it enough, especially if you use alternative LLMs instead of Claude.

The thing that freaks me out about Pi is it seems to have zero sandboxing or security guardrails unless you explicitly add them. I guess it's fine if you're only ever running inside a VM or a throwaway machine anyway.

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.

"longtime ... over a year ago" This time dilation is getting ridiculous.

For usage with open models, I'd highly recommend Swival as an alternative to Pi: https://swival.dev

bbapp is legitimately good too

> 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

Bro talks like an expert and got a point but still using gmail: calebdotsoftware@gmail.com, come on...

neckbeards and their incredibly autistic, specific preferences about everything that nobody cares about.

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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/