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Comment by tmustier | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t met a single person who has tried pi for a few days and not made it their daily driver. Once you taste the freedom of being able to set up your tool exactly how you like, there’s really no going back.

and you can build cool stuff on top of it too!

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> I haven’t met a single person who has tried pi for a few days and not made it their daily driver.

Pleased to meet you!

For me, it just didn’t compare in quality with Claude CLI and OpenCode. It didn’t finish the job. Interesting for extending, certainly, but not where my productivity gains lie.

People seem to be really enjoying rolling everything themselves these days...

Because it’s very easy todo nowadays. Why making compromises in your workflow anymore?

I've spent way too long working around the jank and extra features in Other People's Software.

Now I can just make my own that does exactly what I want and need, nothing more and nothing less. It's just for me, it's not a SaaS or a "start-up" I'm the CEO of.

That seems to be what a significant chunk of the "insane productivity" is actually going into

Seriously? The most common complains on HN is how every software is built upon Electron and React.

Remember that OpenAI ran statistics on ChatGPT conversations and found development related conversations were in the low 10s https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/ - the people who enjoy rolling everything these days is representative of our echo-chamber.

What self-built capabilities do you like the most that claude code doesn't offer?

Not the person you replied to, but I'll stress the point that it is not just what you can add that Claude Code doesn't offer, but also what you don't need to add that Claude Code does offer that you don't want.

I dislike many things about Claude Code, but I'll pick subagents as one example. Don't want to use them? Tough luck. (AFAIK, it's been a while since I used CC, maybe it is configurable now or was always and I never discovered that.)

With Pi, I just didn't install an extension for that, which I suspect exists, but I have a choice of never finding out.

You can just put "Never use subagents" in your CLAUDE.md and it will honor it, no?

IME CLAUDE.md rarely gets fully honored. I've left HN comments before about how I had to convert some CLAUDE.md instructions to pre-commit deterministic checks due to how often they were ignored. My guesstimate is that it is about 70 % reliable. That's with Opus 4.5. I've since switched to GPT-5.2 and now GPT-5.3 Codex and use Codex CLI, Pi and OpenCode, not CC, so maybe things have changed with a new system prompt or with the introduction of Opus 4.6.

This is and has always been trivially configurable. Just put `Task` as a disallowed tool.

"hey, build a connector for z.ai GLM-5"

Can't do that with Claude =)

Claude code includes a large system prompt with every request while tool like pi does not. This could save tokens resulting in lower costs.

It sounds like it is the neovim or Emacs of coding agents.

I came here to say the same thing. It's basically _is_ Emacs. Heavily configurable tool, text-focused UI, primary interaction with a minibuffer ..er.. box to prompt at the bottom of the screen, package distribution mechanism, etc etc.

With Emacs modes like agent-shell.el available and growing, why not invest in learning a tool that is likely to survive and have mindshare beyond the next few months?

I've been using codex for about 2 months now and am pretty happy with it. What does pi do better than codex?

If you ever want to use other models, pi can do that. In the middle of a session I might switch from gpt-5.2 to opus and get it to do something or review something and then switch back to gpt. Since models are being released every few weeks this is interesting to compare models without having to switch to a different harness.

And if there’s any feature codex has that you want, just have pi run codex in a tmux session and interrogate it how said feature works, and recreate it in pi.

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