February 24, 2026
CLI claws come out
Pi – a minimal terminal coding harness
Pi’s coding harness drops hot: speed lovers cheer, security skeptics sneer
TLDR: Pi is a minimalist tool to run AI coding helpers from the terminal, with lots of models and shareable histories. The crowd is split: fans praise its speed and simplicity, while skeptics worry about permissions and trust, turning a lean dev tool into a big safety debate — and a few jokes.
Pi, a minimalist command-line tool for wrangling AI coding assistants, just landed with big promises—15+ model providers, shareable session trees, and tweakable “extensions” that let you teach it new tricks. The community reaction? Split-screen drama. On one side, speed freaks are swooning. rcarmo called it their “current fave” and bragged it’s “so much faster than ACP”, while jmorgan says they’re using it daily for small tasks because Pi’s tiny starter instructions make smaller models feel surprisingly snappy.
On the other side, the trust police showed up. cyanydeez fired a warning flare, pointing to Pi’s “no permission popups” and asking how users can be sure what the agent actually does—cue a bigger debate about control vs convenience in dev tools. Meanwhile, cermicelli lobbed the classic roast, wondering “Just how expensive was that domain?” because yes, naming drama never sleeps.
Power users like arjie want Pi to run headless (no user interface) so it can catch errors and auto-suggest fixes, even file a draft pull request—hinting at Pi’s RPC and SDK angle. Fans love the “adapt it to your workflow” vibe and tree-based history you can share to a GitHub gist, while skeptics demand clearer guardrails. In short: Pi says “keep it simple,” the crowd says “keep it safe.” Grab popcorn
Key Points
- •Pi is a minimal terminal coding harness focused on extensibility and user-driven workflows.
- •It supports 15+ AI providers and hundreds of models, with authentication via API keys or OAuth and mid-session model switching.
- •Conversations are stored as tree-structured sessions with navigation, filtering, bookmarking, and export/share options (HTML, GitHub Gist).
- •Pi emphasizes context engineering through a minimal system prompt, project-level AGENTS.md/SYSTEM.md, compaction, skills, prompt templates, and dynamic context via extensions.
- •It offers four modes (interactive, print/JSON, RPC, SDK) and supports message queuing for steering and follow-up interactions.