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Comment by kloud | Hacker News Reader

The OpenClaw/pi-agent situation seems similar to ollama/llama-cpp, where the former gets all the hype, while the latter is actually the more impressive part.

This is great work, I am looking forward how it evolves in the future. So far Claude Code seems best despite its bugs given the generous subscription, but when the market corrects and the prices will get closer to API prices, then probably the pay-per-token premium with optimized experience will be a better deal than to suffer Claude Code glitches and paper cuts.

The realization is that at the end agent framework kit that is customizable and can be recursively improved by agents is going to be better than a rigid proprietary client app.

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> but when the market corrects and the prices will get closer to API prices

I think it’s more likely that the API prices will decrease over time and the CC allowances will only become more generous. We’ve been hearing predictions about LLM price increases for years but I think the unit economics of inference (excluding training) are much better than a lot of people think and there is no shortage of funding for R&D.

I also wouldn’t bet on Claude Code staying the same as it is right now with little glitches. All of the tools are going to improve over time. In my experience the competing tools aren’t bug free either but they get a pass due to underdog status. All of the tools are improving and will continue to do so.

> I think it’s more likely that the API prices will decrease over time and the CC allowances will only become more generous.

I think this is absolutely true. There will likely be caps to stop the people running Ralph loops/GasTown with 20 clients 24/7, but for general use they will probably start to drop the API prices rather than vice-versa.

> We’ve been hearing predictions about LLM price increases for years but I think the unit economics of inference (excluding training) are much better than a lot of people think

Inference is generally accepted to be a very profitable business (outside the HN bubble!).

Claude Code subscriptions are more complicated of course but I think they probably follow the general pattern of most subscription software - lots of people who hardly use it, and a few who push it very hard can they lose money on. Capping the usage solves the "losing money" problem.

FWIW, you can use subscriptions with pi. OpenAI has blessed pi allowing users to use their GPT subscriptions. Same holds for other providers, except Flicker Company.

And I'm personally very happy that Peter's project gets all the hype. The pi repo already gets enough vibesloped PRs from openclaw users as is, and its still only 1/100th of what the openclaw repository has to suffer through.

Good to know, that makes it even better. I still find Opus 4.5 to be the best model currently. But if next generation of GPT/Gemini close the gap that will cross the inflection point for me and make 3rd party harnesses viable. Or if they jump ahead, that should put more pressure on the Flicker Company to fix the flicker or relax the subscriptions.

Is this something that OpenAI explicitly approves per project? I have had a hard time understanding what their exact position is.

Most likely.

See here OpenCode.

https://x.com/thdxr/status/2009742070471082006?s=20

This is basically identical to the ChatGPT/GPT-3 situation ;) You know OpenAI themselves keep saying "we still don't understand why ChatGPT is so popular... GPT was already available via API for years!"

ChatGPT is quite different from GPT. Using GPT directly to have a nice dialogue simply doesn't work for most intents and purposes. Making it usable for a broad audience took quite some effort, including RLHF, which was not a trivial extension.

This is the first I'm hearing of this pi-agent thing and HOW DO PEOPLE TECH DECIDE TO NAME THINGS?

Seriously. Is creator not aware that "pi" absolutely invokes the name of another very important thing? sigh.

The creator is very aware. Its original name was "shitty coding agent".

https://shittycodingagent.ai/

then do SCA and backronym it into something acceptable! That's even better lore :)

You mean Software Component Architecture? Do you want to bring down the wrath of IBM!

Good call, he'll have to name it Shitty COdingagent, or "SCO". No one will sue over that name.

ding is a good name for an agent

There's a fair chunk of irony here in that Mario is being both anti-memetic with his naming choices and contrarian in his design decisions, and yet he still finds himself dunked in the muck of popularity as the backbone of OpenClaw.

From the article: "So what's an old guy yelling at Claudes going to do? He's going to write his own coding agent harness and give it a name that's entirely un-Google-able, so there will never be any users. Which means there will also never be any issues on the GitHub issue tracker. How hard can it be?"

Developers are the worst at naming things. This is a well known fact.

And like ollama it will no doubt start to get enshittified.

Only if it enters YC (like Ollama).

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