Hacker News
Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi(caleb.software)
46 points by karagenit 3 hours ago | 27 comments
[–] sigttou 57 minutes ago
Pi has been my goto agent for several months now, the project is great and basically runs everywhere. If you like Pi, I suggest taking a look at Deepseek Harness too.

For those using Claude, there's pi-claude-code[0] which is currently still the way to use Ant subs in Pi.

[0] https://github.com/earendil-works/pi-claude-code

[–] rahimnathwani 34 minutes ago
Is that still needed now that Agent SDK usage is included in subscriptions?

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

  Update October 7, 2026: Claude Max, Ultra, and Team plans now include monthly API credits. They cover the Claude API, Claude Managed Agents, and the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p when you run them with an API key from your linked Claude Console organization. Nothing changes for your plan: when you’re signed in with your Claude plan, the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p still draw from your subscription limits.
[–] nsingh2 21 minutes ago
The Agent SDK is using the Claude Code harness. The point of using Pi is to avoid using that harness entirely. It wouldn’t make sense to use the Agent SDK in Pi; you would essentially be driving a harness with another harness.

If you’ve used Codex before, then the Agent SDK is essentially Anthropic’s equivalent of the Codex App Server, which is Codex running headlessly with a protocol to talk to it.

[–] giladd 25 minutes ago
Does Pi support that natively?
[–] kristjansson 17 minutes ago
Yes, in the sense that Ant credits some number of dollars worth of API tokens to your account and Pi has long been happy to use an Ant API key
[–] rudedogg 1 hour ago
Is using Codex through Pi allowed? I've been a Claude user, but a lot of the things mentioned bother me as well. I see it constantly make mistakes due to (simple) shell aliases, etc..

Not sure I'll actually switch but I'm curious. I've thought about trying to build my own harness and use Codex usage to work through it without spending a fortune on credits.

[–] judge2020 51 minutes ago
Anthropic's subscription is the one that has historically been tough to use with other harnesses, where they have (had?) technical safeguards to ensure your subscription usage was limited to Claude Code CLI, with third party harnesses often implementing workarounds or faking it to use your Claude.ai subscription. Nowadays Jetbrains Air does officially allow using your Claude.ai subscription.

But OpenAI's subscription has seemingly always been available to use in other harnesses without trouble.

[–] suoloordi 59 minutes ago
Yes, you can use your Codex subscription with Pi without any limitations. It supports Codex out of the box. You may need to install extensions for things like tracking usage and limit resets though. Pi only provides basic Codex integration.
[–] alexhans 54 minutes ago
Yes. You can and it's easy to test. I'd also encourage you to try local models with it as well.

Pi/opencode apparently make 10% already of all traffic already:

https://manifest.build/blog/chatgpt-plus-tokens-third-party-...

[–] nsingh2 17 minutes ago
This, IMO, is one big selling point of Codex for me. The are much more accepting of usage outside of the Codex harness, and make it trivial to set up.
[–] godelski 47 minutes ago
Yes and no. Any harness can use the subscription but must go through `claude -p` mode, which is more limited.
[–] what 2 minutes ago
Why do you need to use claude to use a codex subscription with pi?
[–] sigttou 1 hour ago
Yes, it is allowed and supported normally by pi and others.
[–] samayashar 56 minutes ago
I think Anthropic is working on allowing AGENTS.md files as well. However, Claude.md files take precedence if present. If not, you fall back to AGENTS.md.
[–] SurfingAlpaca 39 minutes ago
Claude now supports AGENTS.md fully but the rest of what you said holds
[–] bredren 4 minutes ago
It has since 9/16, however folks soon realized it supports AGENTS.md, but not .agents/skills.

This is such an important detail the main issue for this was closed and then reopened with an expanded title:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/31005

[–] justauserid 1 hour ago
> having a ton of CLAUDE.md files scattered about various GitHub hobby repos is great guerrilla marketing

Their real marketing comes/came from https://github.com/claude phenomenon. Irrespective of what underlying model you are using the claude code harness just sticks this github user as git commit author and then you have to make an effort to remove it. That is just odd.

[–] komali2 1 hour ago
Anecdotally I run semi nightly harness and local model test runs, and opencode consistently outperforms ohmypi on various code bench tasks.

Note though that this for local models that can run on a 5090, so, kinda dumb models with a small context window. Also they might perform differently on a custom pi setup rather than the very feature rich ohmypi.

Mostly the runs just cause me to get decision fatigue so I typically just use opencode and let a frontier model choose whatever cheaper models it wants to orchestrate with, so long as it's one that's not on the same token budget.

P.S. I'd always wondered who it was that got caleb.software before I could... Outshot in a western duel!

[–] dofm 54 minutes ago
Alas Opencode's source is hideous to read.

When you say "kinda dumb" it's worth noting that the smaller coding models tend not to actually need system prompts to be helpful coding assistants, etc. Qwen maybe more than Muse Glimmer? I've not tested Qwen 3.8 27B enough yet. Even Gemma 4 didn't seem to need much.

Muse Glimmer is so absolutely tuned for one particular pattern (turn-by-turn agentic coding and assistance) that it will do it more or less without a prompt at all (except to set the reasoning level maybe). Beyond the tools announcement, it feels to me like it almost only needs a prompt to do plan mode stuff. If LM Studio (in either of its forms) or Unsloth Desktop had proper support for running inside a linux container rather than just a filesystem sandbox, you'd barely need a dedicated coding agent at all. Osaurus gets even closer.

I wanted to like Opencode but I can't, really. I am enjoying Pi slightly more because it's just way less convoluted and obscure.

FWIW I use Paseo for the GUI, which to some extent eliminates that aspect of decision fatigue; if you like Paseo's UI well enough, you can have it with almost any harness. And since it can connect to its daemon via ssh you can still have the desktop GUI with a container. (Not clear to me if Opencode v2 Desktop makes remote connections to the daemon or just wraps the web interface like v1 did)

[–] load-bearing 31 minutes ago
I do not know how it is with Glimmer, but other Facebook models (Muse and whatever is currently hiding under "Crouton") sure love ignoring direct instructions to do or not do something important (like not using particular broken/inefficient tools). Doesn't matter if it's repeated ten times in screaming caps, they'll still ignore it at least sometimes.

No other model I've used does this.

[–] bdemirkir 1 hour ago
Opencode's system prompt is much smaller than omp. Smaller models may not work well just because of this. Also omp is not pi.
[–] segmondy 19 minutes ago
ohmypi is not pi, it's based on pi, but it's not pi.
[–] yieldcrv 1 hour ago
I get 150 tokens/sec on my coding agent, if you are on a MacBook, thats with an M1

try kapitsa as the inference engine with pi as the harness

It works really well

[–] ohmahjong 49 minutes ago
Man, my M1 Pro unfortunately only has 16GB of RAM; it has been such a limiter to using local models. I'll give kapitsa a try, I see I should be able to squeeze some smaller models on
[–] O_H_E 54 minutes ago
> At the time of writing, there have been 244 releases to Claude Code this year; over 3/4 of these changed the system prompt or tool descriptions.

ooof, that is a lot!

And we're supposed to believe them and start one-shotting our projects...

[–] dannyw 30 minutes ago
Alternatively, what you’re seeing is continuous hill climbing and optimisations based on large scale experiments and simulated rollouts.

For me personally, I don’t use Claude Code because I can’t read the source.

At least with Codex, I know there’s a bunch of telemetry and all that, but I can have my agent inspect the source and have relatively greater confidence it’s not implanting spyware onto my machine, because a classifier thinks I’m working for Deepseek or something.

[–] lifeisloving 26 minutes ago
They're hill climbing by changing their system prompt... That's not how thats done.

They're changing system prompts to control how users use their llms.

[–] andsoitis 2 hours ago
> Someone at Anthropic must’ve caught wind… just a day after making my decision, they announced Claude Code would finally start supporting AGENTS.md files in an effort to get me to stay.

Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous?

[–] bluerooibos 2 hours ago
'Tis a joke. His landing page says he's a dev at Salesforce, so I presume not famous.
[–] karagenit 1 hour ago
I’m definitely not famous :^) thanks for reading!
[–] TacticalCoder 2 hours ago
>> Someone at Anthropic must’ve caught wind… just a day after making my decision, they announced Claude Code would finally start supporting AGENTS.md files in an effort to get me to stay.

> Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous?

I think that was tongue in cheek. And by that I don't mean the author's tongue was actually in his cheek.

I also think it went over your head. And by that I don't mean I think it literally went over your head.

[–] cwnyth 1 hour ago
It's clearly a joke, but I can forgive some people for taking it literally, given the impact that certain well-known devs have on other companies' decision-making. It's a common enough line that it's plausible this could have been a VIP whose opinions swayed a company. Not him and not Anthropic, of course, but it does happen.
[–] derektank 1 hour ago
I wouldn’t even say not Anthropic, Boris is soliciting recommendations for Claude Code right now in the secrets exposure thread. Hardly implausible
[–] arcanemachiner 1 hour ago
I can't believe you didn't pick up on the sarcasm in the GP's comment...
[–] ozlikethewizard 1 hour ago
While I agree the sarcasm is obvious, important to remember sarcasm doesnt really translate well if english is not your first language, and notoriously does not translate well online regardless, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

[–] harrisonjackson 1 hour ago
The whole AGENTS vs CLAUDE md issue was bound to be resolved. If the models are getting smarter and harnesses getting better - how could you have a product so dumb that it ignores whatever skills, instructions, references, other things that are part of the folder context it is mounted in.

Having claude code ignore agents.md just made it seem dumb. At this point, you probably don't need either.

[–] arcanemachiner 1 hour ago
> At this point, you probably don't need either.

There's only so much stuff I have the patience to tell it in a session before I write it down somewhere.

[–] margalabargala 21 minutes ago
"Write down the rules I told you in CLAUDE.md"
[–] aeon_ai 1 hour ago
> It seems like there isn’t someone high-up whose job is strictly to say “no” to these requests, which is incredibly important when it comes to product engineering

Ah, product management - we know so few of ye who know what you're doing.

[–] jMyles 1 hour ago
I mean... sure, yeah.

But this feels like six weeks (or more) out-of-date. And so it is - from mid-September. And I know that observing such a thing sounds bizarre and teenage, but that's kind of a long time right now; we're at a moment in history when things are moving fast.

We're not really fully ready for the traffic TBH, but for those who few of you choose to click, this is what we've been doing with pi lately:

https://magenta.cryptograss.live/

[–] skybrian 1 hour ago
Made me click, but I have no idea what this is supposed to be.