July 8, 2026
Pi in the sky, drama on the ground
I Built a Telegram Client for Pi
A phone-friendly AI helper drops on Telegram, and the comments instantly turn into a Pi identity crisis
TLDR: A developer turned Telegram into a phone-friendly remote control for Pi, an AI assistant you can run from your own computer. Commenters were less busy praising features than arguing over what “Pi” even means and joking that maybe the AI built the app itself.
A developer has launched a new way to use Pi, an AI helper and coding assistant, through Telegram so people can boss it around from their phones instead of squinting at tiny terminal windows. The setup is very DIY: install a package, make a Telegram bot, link your account, and suddenly your private chat becomes a full-on control room with buttons, slash commands, file uploads, exports, and even session management. In plain English: it turns Telegram into a remote for your local AI assistant.
But the real show was in the comments, where the first wave of reactions was basically: wait, which Pi are we talking about? One confused reader had to point out that this is not Raspberry Pi, and another mourned that they were “hoping id get to talk to 3.14 over telegram.” That misunderstanding became the thread’s running gag, with readers joking that the biggest bug here was branding.
Then came the classic AI-era side-eye. One commenter went straight for the jugular: “Did you built it or did you tell PI to build it?” Ouch. That line captured the main tension perfectly: when someone says they built a tool for an AI tool, people now immediately ask how much of the coding was actually human. Meanwhile, defenders jumped in to say Pi is a serious underdog project, not some random side hustle, and deserves more respect. So yes, the app is real, useful, and packed with features — but the comments turned it into a battle over naming, AI authorship, and whether Pi is secretly cooler than people think.
Key Points
- •The article introduces an experimental Telegram client for Pi, distributed as the npm package `@atharva-again/pi-tg` with the `pi-tg` binary.
- •Setup requires a Telegram bot token, an allowed Telegram user ID, and commands including `pi-tg setup` and `pi-tg doctor`.
- •The client stores configuration in `~/.pi/agent/telegram/config.json` with `0600` permissions, while flags and `PI_TELEGRAM_*` environment variables can override saved settings.
- •A normal Telegram direct message corresponds to one Pi session by default, and the client registers Pi slash commands plus Telegram-native `/start` and `/help`.
- •The client supports interactive features such as model selection, scoped models, import/export, sharing, session management, branching, cloning, tree navigation, reload, and quit actions.