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.