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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

There are some people that are "way too deep" into what they think is the "AI ecosystem". The reality is that no such thing exists and most people opening Claude daily have never heard of their harness, tool, stack or whatever. It has about half the relevancy of "MCP", which is such a similar concept where hanger ons try to catch a steam train.

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Wow, I couldn't disagree more!

Claude Code is a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat.

Pi has been elegantly designed with a minimalist mindset.

> It has about half the relevancy of "MCP", which is such a similar concept where hanger ons try to catch a steam train.

I'm not even sure what you're saying here. Are you saying MCP and Pi are similar concepts? Or that both are hanger-ons? I believe the steam train of Claude Code is heading for a wall and Pi has no intention to catch it.

> Claude Code is a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat.

Not disagreeing but I'm curious how much it really matters.

I use OpenCode which is similarly a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat and get pretty good results!

I'm open to switching to pi, which I've read about occasionally on HN, but I'm struggling to see where it might have practical benefits versus OpenCode.

The idea that pi is now under corporate governance with a potentially sustainable business model does intrigue me, but there's risk in adopting "open core" software too due to the potential rug pull and incentives to gate important features behind more restrictive licenses.

I think they are similar to Cursor. They are fads. You need to make the model, not smother it with your ingenuity in wrapping it.

One of the selling points of Pi is that it doesn't "smother the model with ingenuity": it's a minimal harness with a focus on transparency, includes a minimal system prompt, and does not add needless tokens to what you are sending to the model.

What agent do you use then? To me it seems most are terrible, incl Claude Code, OpenCode, and the other usual ones. I never felt an urge to use one. At best I used one very reluctantly as a magical black box.

Pi does seem special, at least to me. The only close to happy experience I have had coding with a small local model has been with Pi. Here is how I ran Pi and I was impressed how well it worked with a 9B model:

OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=16384 ollama launch pi --model qwen3.5:9b

To get close to a happy experience with Claude Code or OpenCode with small local models I had to use 28B to 32B local models.

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