That is very disappointing coz I've been wanting to try an alternative to Gemini CLI for exactly these reasons. The AI is great but the actual software is a buggy, slow, bloated blob of TypeScript (on a custom Node runtime IIUC!) that I really hate running. It takes multiple seconds to start, requires restarting to apply settings, constantly fucks up the terminal, often crashes due to JS heap overflows, doesn't respect my home dir (~/.gemini? Come on folks are we serious?), has an utterly unusable permission system, etc etc. Yet they had plenty of energy to inject silly terminal graphics and have dumb jokes and tips scroll across the screen.
Is Claude Code like this too? I wonder if Pi is any better.
A big downside would be paying actual cost price for tokens but on the other hand, I wouldn't be tied to Google's model backend which is also extremely flaky and unable to meet demand a lot of the time. If I could get real work done with open models (no idea if that's the case yet) and switch providers when a given provider falls over, that would be great.