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Comment by loveparade | Hacker News Reader

Understandable, I'd probably do the same in his position. Still sucks, we've seen this pattern a thousands times before and what happens next is pretty obvious.

I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.

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Like he iterates in the blog post multiple times: It's still MIT licensed, you can fork it to your heart's content. Or keep using the mainline and merge new features to your own fork.

For me the reason to add dependencies to my projects is exactly because they are maintained upstream and I don't need to worry about maintaining them myself. If I need to fork and maintain it myself I'd rather write my own version of it that perfectly fits my use case, or use another dependency that is maintained.

The company is from the person who created Flask which has remained very open and free. It might be a little too early to be cynical about this.

> I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.

For what it's worth, it's pretty straightforward to recreate it I found, at least it's base idea. Readline w/ nice output is a bit of a pain, but still, doable, and if you don't care about that part of it, then the overall agent loop that you'd build on top of? You could build it, I promise.

What you are suggesting might sound difficult to some people, it is possible: in the last week I co-wrote (with Antigravity with Claude as the backend) an Emacs package for agentic coding that also just uses ‘rg’ for finding relevant code for the context, call out to a model, and handle creating a diff with merging tools. I love using my own code that provides inside Emacs vibe coding and I would suggest others try building the same thing.

EDIT: here is a link of what I wrote just for my own use: https://github.com/mark-watson/coding-agent

Exactly! The actual base loop of these agents is remarkably simple.

https://github.com/girvo/girvent this is my silly one :)

looks nice!

I suggest you make yourself a private fork of Pi so that you don't have to be beholden to Mario and his not-so-new clique.

Create a private repo in GitHub first, then do a bare Git clone of https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono.git (ideally do it before the original repo gets moved to Earendil's GitHub org).

  git clone --bare https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono.git

then push that bare clone up to your private repo:

  git push --mirror <url of your private repo>

Afterwards, delete that bare clone and clone your new private repo, then set upstream to the original badlogic/pi-mono repo:

  git remote add upstream https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono.git

How long you want to continue pulling from "upstream" depends on your comfort level. At the very least, aim for v0.65.2, which is the last tagged release before today's announcement (commit hash 573eb91). Personally, I would continue to pull right up until the next tagged release.

I can already see in https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/commit/6d2d03dcc9a39e60c... that the Earendil announcement will be popping up in the next released version of Pi. Even has a dumb pic of Mario, Armin, and I presume Colin, which will be displayed in Pi: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/6d2d03dcc9a39e60c37...

With that little how-to guide out of the way, here's what I think:

Mario is free to do whatever and not give a shit about what the internet at large thinks of him. By that metric, he's doing a hell of a job with that rambling blog post. Likewise, I'm also free to mostly concur with the internet at large (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688794) and prepare simple mitigations like above that can blunt this to a certain degree. Let's just hope that Mario and Armin don't take the "flicker company" approach (his derogatory term for Anthropic) and DMCA the shit out of any private repos.

How does DMCA apply? The license is MIT.

I have a private Gitea exactly for stuff like that and Gitea can mirror GitHub repos out of the box and keep it in sync (and it's Git so you can always revert).

Or fork it?

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