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Comment by malisper | Hacker News Reader

Having tried all the coding harnesses, I find that using Pi is exactly like using Emacs. For anything you want to build you can ask your agent and it will build it. There's tons of existing code to help you configure it. At the same time half the code is buggy, UI elements will try to overlap one another, and you'll periodically get crashes.

If you're willing to put in the work to master the learning curve and push through the issues, it can be a great tool: https://i.sstatic.net/7Cu9Z.jpg

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I don't really get this philosophy, at least with coding harnesses.

I don't want to spend 2 hours prompting, configuring and fixing features that I need which are standard in every other harness. I don't really want to be wasting my tokens to make an application function like every other harness. I don't really want to have to repeat the cycle on every machine I want to work with. Every VM, every server, every laptop.

There are decent plugins for the essentials you’d find in other harnesses. Pi shines in opinionated things you won’t find elsewhere.

For instance the XMPP integration someone mentioned allowing agents to talk to each other and to you remotely; or custom extensions to enable workers to be tmux aware; or adding whatever memory system you’d like; and so on

If you want something that's like every other harness then what's the point of considering pi? It's specifically for people who are dissatisfied with other harnesses.

Also, you can version control your tweaks and easily sync with other machines, just like any code.

I'm the opposite. I started out promising myself I'd install all those handy looking plugins (I had like 20 I wanted to try out). But I've been slippery sloped into building my own Pi extensions and reinventing the wheel many, many times. It's been months and I love it. I just keep discovering and learning, and forgetting, and doing it all over again. I've been building my own harnesses since before that word was so common though, even before Aider was released.

Other harnesses tend to have 20k tokens in their system prompt and too many tools, and that drags them down.

Never learned Emacs but am a Neovim user. But similar to what I said to my colleagues as well. Codex, Claude Code are VS Code, Jetbrain. Pi is Neovim.

It's funny you say this, because as someone that rejected emacs (default editor was XEmacs on the Sun machines in my 90s CS computer lab) in favor of vim early. I think a big part of the appeal of vim for me is that it's a great editor just based on the defaults. Sure you can configure it but you don't need to. Emacs strength is customization, and that's what Pi feels like compared to batteries-included harnesses.

I understand both world views and both are legitimate. But I do feel like LLMs are advancing so quickly that it's not a good use of my time to optimize harnesses at this point. I have actual work to do, so sharpening my tools needs to be selective and time-boxed. Personally I'm staying agnostic on harness, not locking into Codex or Claude Code, but also not prematurely optimizing things that tens of thousands of other tools-focused developers are going deep on across the ecosystem. My goal is not to be an early adopter but to reap the benefits of all that experimentation.

I agree. Pi is more like NeoVim if we have to map to Vim/Emacs. Emacs is full (at least compared to Vim) of the hidden features you didn't know it had installed. Pi doesn't bundle any hidden features. A bog standard GNU Emacs install contains, what, like ~10 games, a mail reader, a web browser, RSS feed reader, a nd a Morse code decipher?

Even more so, Pi even has opinionated forks and "distributions" like oh-my-pi that are like LazyVim/AstroVim.

If you like Emacs, why not make Emacs your harness?

https://github.com/karthink/gptel

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