Pi coding agent: config folder is out of place on Linux

Systemerror7A69•about 3 hours ago

This has been frustrating me for a while and is part of why I explore other coding agents.

As many advantages as pi has in some areas, there are definitely areas where I believe the hype to be a bit overstated. While the config folder is, ultimately, not relevant for performance, how this was and is continued to handled is a bit frustrating for me.

They have made it abundantly clear it's not going to change however so I'm looking at how other coding agents perform currently.

cassianoleal•19 minutes ago

While we wait for GitHub to come back, what exactly is "this" for the uninitiated?

Systemerror7A69•6 minutes ago

Oh sorry - basically just a github ticket to an explanation about the .config folder. Pi doesn't respect XDG_BASE_DIR specification, and even if you use the env var it combines cache and config.

The ticket is closed and this will not be changed, period.

fny•about 2 hours ago

LLMs make it gloriously simple to fork and patch and existing repo. If you run into a merge conflict down the line, its a snap to fix too.

Just make the changes you want to your favorite harness and move on.

coldbrewed•about 2 hours ago

In practice this requires duplicating the upstream build and release pipelines, so now you need yet another agent running in the background (+ periodically going off the rails + eating tokens) which incurs more up front cost and cognitive overhead.

In my experience "throw another agent at it/fork it" consistently creates unsupervised trainwrecks.

taosx•25 minutes ago

Fully agree with this. I did that for pi for a while, maintained it and brought merges from upstream while having my own patches on top but then went on holidays and there was that refactor where the agent pipeline failed... now I'm stuck on the version from april/may (works great but I can't use extensions; and I'm too lazy to debug/fix while everything works great).

off: I'm working on my spare time on a code mode lisp alternative (great opportunity to learn lisp) and might switch to it fully as long as I built some simple evals (I'm concerned about token usage, which is why i forked pi the first time)

Systemerror7A69•about 2 hours ago

Sure but I'm really not that invested in one single harness. I tried out pi because people were recommending it so much. It turns out I personally have some things which annoy me, so I try out others now as well.

If I don't find anything which fits me I might fork it, but even that little effort is not really worth it if theres something which fits me better.

I already found maki which...seems to do the exact same job pi did for me, and I wanna check out crush as well.

bArray•about 3 hours ago

404 on the page, main page: "Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time." [1]. GitHub are you okay?

Edit: Known issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330597

[1] https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/

world2vec•about 3 hours ago

I keep getting the Unicorn or 404.

droidjj•about 3 hours ago

I think this is a GitHub issue (of course it is) as I'm not able to search for anything atm.

throw1234567891•about 2 hours ago

Who cares, geez. Is a single github issue so important that this needs to land on the front page? You can move it and configure your own env to have it wherever you want.

I use pi and couldn’t care less.

Pi coding agent: config folder is out of place on Linux

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