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Comment by Schlagbohrer | Hacker News Reader

I have found the Pi agent harness, running in a docker container, with Qwen3.8-27B in back in LM Studio, to be amazing and i use it daily. Just last weekend I used it to do PDF editing which previously would have required me to download really shady software online to do.

I have never tried OpenClaw so maybe I am missing out but considering how much my agent can modify the Pi environment to work better, I am happy with the workflow I have established.

Does anyone have a good pro vs con for Pi vs OpenClaw? I have never tried using a cloud model via a local agentic harness.

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No problem/con here, but I think the main reason for openclaw became famous is that it was a harness you could connect via messaging apps (esp telegram).

That way you could have an assistant with your full computer context available on the go.

Additionally, it’s super battery-included, pretty much the opposite of pi

Pi agent supports messaging apps now.

I'm actually building my own version of Open Claw, custom tailored to me using the Pi agent SDK and Discord.

Is this something native by pi, or from 3rd party devs?

Hermes supports this too, just do `/handoff telegram` and your current session is moved to telegram, it pings you on your phone, etc. It's pretty nice, though I do still prefer the Codex dedicated app for remote control

Thats cool, did not know that, thanks!

What about pi?

To me it’s kind of the dumbest thing about it. “Talk to claude from anywhere” - huh, like I already do? Why can’t I have an extra app? How do I manage my sessions?

I (as somebody also DIYing) consider the defining feature of a “claw” to be task scheduling/some form of autonomous action.

> Just last weekend I used it to do PDF editing which previously would have required me to download really shady software online to do.

Agreed on the shady software (or shitty online website that asks you for a payment after you're done editing), however, wouldn't the best PDF edition approaches involve WYSIWYG style edition? I'm guessing you didn't get that with Pi.

IMO the key advantages are (1) connectivity and (2) self improvement.

I am not the kind of guy who hands his personal email to an AI. But the self improvement part seems to be useful. Maybe something similar can be achieved by pi using an skill that always runs when you exit it?

> Just last weekend I used it to do PDF editing which previously would have required me to download really shady software online to do.

Last (only) time I used AI for this it helpfully made additional unwanted changes to the document. I decided never to do this on complex docs where I will have to re-check everything.

As someone who ever used either: Are they comparable? I thought of them very differently, Pi more being, idk, a codex-light like thing and OpenClaw being this continuously running machine, doing stuff without your explicit prompting, ingesting signals.

I need to read up.

OpenClaw is built on top of Pi.

That would support my notion that one is a fundamental block/lib for the other thing, and not really comparable. Am I wrong?

They are different like you say, but the jump from an interactive, agentic shell like pi to a long running agent like OpenClaw is not a hard jump to make with extensions and scripts. Even just running pi in a cron job will get you a large portion of the way there.

what are you using for reading/writing pdf? is it some mcp plugin or some pdf lib in python/js and qwen is doing it via code?

As much as I love my CLI tools, I just cannot go back to not having native built-in browser integration, links, etc which the (Mac) desktop apps like ChatGPT or Claude offer.

I do use Hermes sometimes, but it tends to keep growing skills and overhead over time, to the point it is becoming utterly slow and sluggish. The Desktop experience itself seems vibecoded without taste, in contrast to the core of Hermes, which is solid.

I wonder if there is an agent harness that has the strengths of Pi, but in a native Mac desktop app packaging?

Not native, but a webapp: https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw

you can try mine: github.com/0gsd/enough ... though it is for text planning more than coding, it does fit your criteria :)

Llama.cpp has a web UI, but if you need a harness, OpenCode now has a web UI too

If you are only using a 27b model, you have no idea what you are missing out on..

It's transformed my company and have 500% growth since February.

Sorry I can't exactly share what we are doing. NDAs and stuff.

I don't even know if this reply is sarcastic or not, because it perfectly caricatures the constant hyperbolic AI claims, along with their absence of proof.

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