- It has 3.6 million weekly NPM downloads.
- 110k GH stars.
- It's 5th (and its fork is 6th and a dependent is 8th) in monthly Openrouter tokens. Add them all together and they get close to Claude Code numbers.
There are maybe 30-60 million software developers and software developer adjacent people on this planet. Out of those probably 30% are late AI adopters, laggards, that haven't even used a terminal client and some don't even use AI.
Also a lot of people - developers included, just don't like command line tools.
Then pi is a secondary harness after Claude, Codex, OpenCode. I imagine the likelihood of pi having more than a few hundreds of thousands of users is remote. It's basically the Emacs or Vim of harnesses.
I've been working for 20 years and I've met exactly 1 person daily driving Emacs (at least for a while), probably 10 people daily driving Vim and maybe low hundreds side arming Vim (maybe 5 for Emacs). And I've met or worked with low thousands of people at this point.
If I had to guess, probably 100 000 Vim daily drivers and maybe 20 000 Emacs daily drivers, both for extended periods of time. Dabblers probably 2-3x that at any time.
You'd see a lot more Emacs users (comparatively) in academic jobs than, let's say, web development.
As an anecdote, I worked for a network monitoring company, 90%+ of the devs were on vim. Later, I worked in a run-of-the-mill SaaS, 90%+ of the devs were on VSCode.
I'd think that (neo)vim is quite popular. Emacs, less so, that's true.
But according to the Lindy's effect, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode disappears before Emacs and Vim. Especially as heavy LLM users are opening their text editor less and less.
Though, I realize now the "hundreds of thousands" claim I was responding to is per week, while my guess is all time.
True, but I think even OpenClaw usage has falled off a cliff, plus that makes it implicit usage, most OpenClaw users probably don't care either way, it was chosen for them and they probably don't think much about it.