Pi coding agent: config folder is out of place on Linux | Hacker News Reader

Pi coding agent: config folder is out of place on Linux

github.com

56 pointsjoooscha21 comments

This has been frustrating me for a while and is part of why I explore other coding agents.

As many advantages as pi has in some areas, there are definitely areas where I believe the hype to be a bit overstated. While the config folder is, ultimately, not relevant for performance, how this was and is continued to handled is a bit frustrating for me.

They have made it abundantly clear it's not going to change however so I'm looking at how other coding agents perform currently.

LLMs make it gloriously simple to fork and patch and existing repo. If you run into a merge conflict down the line, its a snap to fix too.

Just make the changes you want to your favorite harness and move on.

Sure but I'm really not that invested in one single harness. I tried out pi because people were recommending it so much. It turns out I personally have some things which annoy me, so I try out others now as well.

If I don't find anything which fits me I might fork it, but even that little effort is not really worth it if theres something which fits me better.

I already found maki which...seems to do the exact same job pi did for me, and I wanna check out crush as well.

In practice this requires duplicating the upstream build and release pipelines, so now you need yet another agent running in the background (+ periodically going off the rails + eating tokens) which incurs more up front cost and cognitive overhead.

In my experience "throw another agent at it/fork it" consistently creates unsupervised trainwrecks.

Fully agree with this. I did that for pi for a while, maintained it and brought merges from upstream while having my own patches on top but then went on holidays and there was that refactor where the agent pipeline failed... now I'm stuck on the version from april/may (works great but I can't use extensions; and I'm too lazy to debug/fix while everything works great).

off: I'm working on my spare time on a code mode lisp alternative (great opportunity to learn lisp) and might switch to it fully as long as I built some simple evals (I'm concerned about token usage, which is why i forked pi the first time)

While we wait for GitHub to come back, what exactly is "this" for the uninitiated?

Oh sorry - basically just a github ticket to an explanation about the .config folder. Pi doesn't respect XDG_BASE_DIR specification, and even if you use the env var it combines cache and config.

The ticket is closed and this will not be changed, period.

Thanks. Just for clarification:

> even if you use the env var it combines cache and config

You mean both cache and config respect Pi's config env var, or that they get combined somehow independently of the variable?

I assume the former, just wanted to confirm.

From what I understood in the ticket ( I haven't confirmed independently) it's the later. You can set an environment variable to move the .pi directory ( into your XDG Config dir) but it's both the cache and config combined.

Quick Edit: Since github is back up, heres the comment I was referencing: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/534#issuecomment...

Ah thanks. I see the problem now. In fairness, it doesn't concern me personally very much, but the refusal to engage is not great.

What's even more frustrating is that there's a very simple and elegant solution suggested in the thread, to simply check for an existing folder and use the proper convention if not found.

This feels like the sort of decision that well meaning folks that manage utilities can disagree on. It's frustrating every time it happens because it's usually a fairly reasonable perspective to ask for XDG / operating system specific support for folders to be respected. (e.g. macOS's ~/Library stuff).

Posting a github issue like this though feels like an easy brigading target, so please don't do that.

404 on the page, main page: "Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time." [1]. GitHub are you okay?

Edit: Known issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330597

[1] https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/

I keep getting the Unicorn or 404.

I think this is a GitHub issue (of course it is) as I'm not able to search for anything atm.

I've been seeing this pattern so frequently of obvious simple things like XDG being ignored. Cynically, I think it's the result of I experienced people suddenly being able to make tools. They never learned all these standards, so if an LLM spews out a junky solution, they're none-the-wiser. Now we have a proliferation of software making mistakes on solved problems, as people are not slowing down to learn how things should be.

I don't care at all, no need for a .config/ move.

Dude this is the same with cursor...its eating my memory so much.

it appears that some people are extremely particular about how everything should be in right place.

This breaks a few things or at least make things harder.

Also, if every app would save their carp in my home folder it soon would be impossible to find anything.

Who cares, geez. Is a single github issue so important that this needs to land on the front page? You can move it and configure your own env to have it wherever you want.

I use pi and couldn’t care less.

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