Care to share more about your pi setup? I've recently started using it (after long-time Claude Code work) and was wondering how you'd achieve these long-running tasks. Do you allow it to spawn sub-agents? Thank you!
* Install pi and a bunch of extensions from their package repo
* Realize that all the packages (with a few exceptions) are massively overcomplicated and vibe coded
* Ask pi to rebuild a very simple version of the packages I used. So e.g. subagents - all the default subagent extensions are massively complicated with named agents, recursion, communication. I made one that stripped all that out.
* Then whenever I hit an annoyance, spin up a parallel session and fix it.
It's less work than it appears because I have ~5 extensions: hooks, subagents, background processes, a custom footer, a loop command... Maybe that's it. Within a couple of days you can have a setup pretty close to Claude Code but with a fraction of the base context use. After gradual improvements over a few weeks/months you'll have a system far better, tuned to your exact preference.
Of course, just like Linux or any other highly tunable system equally important is having the restraint to not spend all your time tuning it. I've definitely had a couple of days where I was bored with my real work and did that, but whatever, it beats browsing reddit.
As for getting long running tasks, I set a looping message every ~20m and tell the agent to strictly track progress in a session doc, then reread and continue after each compaction.
I've not come across a programming task that would take an LLM ten hours.
Overnight it ran ~800 tiny auditors. I then run synthesis on the written audit files, extract bugs, then another round to find which ones have a common source, group them by priority etc.
I've cautiously started doing larger tasks that are not just read only, for example I was dealing with a large codebase full of lint and type errors, so I sent out waves of workers with clear instructions to only fix obvious/trivial issues to and otherwise to append to a todo file for my review. That worked well and cleared a few thousand issues over several hours.
I don't really want to share any other tasks I've worked on this way because it'll draw out the agentic coding sceptics and I'm not interested in defending my workflow.
It's one of the reasons I suggest you study the famous setups (oh my pi, or superhuman skills etc.) and convert them to your personal needs.