The GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, which makes history easier and cleaner to scroll through, also no scrolling bugs, rich text is easier to read with tables, and images integrated into the chat, resources like browsers in the context of the session. Drag and drop session organization (pins), scheduled tasks, etc.. all that in the side bar.
Usually a TUI would be open in VS Code and scoped to whatever repo I'm working with so 10 projects, 10 VS Code instances open, not super scalable. With the GUI desktop app it's one app, and I can start sessions in an repo and switch between them easily, no need to open VS Code for each. I don't see what could make me want to go back to using a TUI.
Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?
Take a look at the Codex App Server or the Claude Agent SDK as a way to communicate with harnesses running headlessly and build your own UI on top. I’m sure Pi can be set up in a similar fashion.
I wanted more control over the harness itself, especially tool execution, sandboxing, approvals, and context management.
Recently built a native macOS app with GPUI on top of the same agent runloop. It's been interesting exploring how the same engine works across terminal and desktop workflows.
I have 2 versions that are just for working on unity projects. One that is for working on the client project. There is also one that I refer to as the ring of power / Death Star that I keep mostly to myself. Eventually, the client saw what I was doing and decided they wanted a custom ChatGPT.com experience for the whole team, so I got paid to build the most recent one.
Using AI to assist with the development of this stuff is the RSI you've been looking for. I'm in a situation where I was only able to solve a problem due to two levels of bootstrapping enabled by custom harnesses. The product the client uses cannot be "one shot" using the latest frontier tools. I had to build an ad-hoc agent loop fit for just that one purpose using another tool that was possible to build via copilot. For example, using copilot in VS over a unity project's scripts might as well be a drunk person throwing darts from a boat compared to a purpose built harness that can execute ad-hoc scripts in the editor environment as often as it pleases.
The client's custom experience is better than ChatGPT.com in many important ways now. It certainly performs better. It will run on safari without doing horrific things to layout and my CPU. You can easily exceed the capabilities of the frontier AI companies in ways that are important if you use their tools cleverly. These companies are great at making AI models. Not harnesses, websites, apps, etc.
The outputs of Opus 5.5 were so much easier to read, but I do find the the deepseek web based tool much easier to comprehend for some reason. Plus I can access it from phone (over tailscale) as well when out and about and continue sessions very easily. AND it is all open source/weights. I'm pretty thrilled, but it's been less than a week.
I have a project folder which is my default environment, and within it I have my many repo clones. That way I can work on any project from my prompt and reference elements in one project to include in another.
I continue to get good results using lifeOS (though I don't use the entire setup) https://github.com/danielmiessler/LifeOS
1. Potential ban due to ToS violation;
2. It doesn't follow all Anthropic's communication mechanisms out-of-the-box, they heavily use custom headers, hidden flags, and undocumented API features that affect models' behavior;
3. Compact is better in CC (significantly);
4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);
5. It's almost unavoidable to use Pi's extensions, and I wouldn't trust my oauth token to anything third-party (take a look at regular reddit/X posts where people getting banned due to such leaks and abuse) -> it takes enormous amount of hacking on top of Pi to get closer to CC abilities.
CC has hooks and mods, even ui_* (undocumented) protocol if you need some big customization, those are enough to implement whatever you want on top of CC.
Also, I'm working with CC from the very first versions, as for me - it's the best harness (as-is) on the market. I have zero clue what problems people are talking about (except known big issues, 3-4 over the years, I've never had serious problems, at all). Seamless and smooth experience, optimized for Anthropic models.
P.S. You can consider this as Stockholm syndrome effect, but... you have close to zero chances to get unbanned with Anthropic, and it's the best coding model(s) available today.
I cannot get behind CC is the best harness. Once u switched to pi I knew I was never going back and occasionally I need to use CC for my subscription and find it unpleasant. CC is just this incoherent hodge podge of functionality that seems to have no vision. Subjective, of course.
I feel like the max CC plans are incredible value.
I'd be curious to know the background around this. At work, I've used @anthropic/Opus 5.5 through Portkey with Pi, and ended up with $10 within less than 10 message exchanges, on a fairly trivial topic. OTOH, when using Claude Code directly with Opus 5.5, I basically spent $30 for a good back-and-forth across a full chat, reaching the point where CC kicked off compaction.
When I'm doing work stuff I'm really not liking claude and only using it because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses. If work would give me a $20 ollama cloud subscription in place of the $200 claude one I would be much more happy at work, that's how much I dislike it.
You're not able to use the API credit and hook it up to another harness?
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/api-credits...
I don't think this is true. They never went through with this change. If you use the SDK it appears ToS compliant. You just can't sell it or distribute it, hence why pi doesn't support it.
they do though?
edit: i guess the parent comment meant subscriptions specifically.
My interruptions and frustration with llms has gone down a cliff. It’s amazing to see what just a few lines of system prompt really can do to keep agents doing the correct thing much more often.
You can do this with any harness. I really dislike the Node.js ecosystem and avoid Pi and the like. I started with another one written in Go that has all the basics and I can extend it in minutes for anything I need while keeping track of upstream.
Does using Pi saves you so much token overhead that my maths are wrong?
You can run larger flash models on a modern PC using strata. These models perform pretty good even on low quants.
Furthermore, next generation open weight models will swap some compute for storage, making them more accessible for masses.
Not trying to diss on anything or anybody. I want to know.
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.
But OpenAI's subscription has seemingly always been available to use in other harnesses without trouble.
Pi/opencode apparently make 10% already of all traffic already:
https://manifest.build/blog/chatgpt-plus-tokens-third-party-...
For those using Claude, there's pi-claude-code[0] which is currently still the way to use Ant subs in Pi.
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.
If you’ve used Codex before, then the Agent SDK is Anthropic’s equivalent of the Codex App Server, which is Codex running headlessly with a protocol to talk to it.
I gave the harness a try and it is refreshing, but the insistence on staying bare bones and not implementing basic functionality natively, together with no vetting process for popular 3rd party modules, made me return to Claude Code.
I built a policy authorizer on top of pi-permission-system that looks kinda like nftables that models commands/subcommands/options as read/write and enfores policies depending on if the sub agent is read only or write, which really cuts down on the stupid decisions and nicely complements AI cmd review. Pi shines for making things like that possible.
I'm spawning a lot of agents to work in parallel. I guess I should just use the API, but it just shows that it does some random stuff you might not agree with. 99% of the users are ok with it because they don't have a 10gb repository
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.
DeepSeek harness for example seemed really powerful when I tried it.
I'm using Cecli which started life as an Aider fork..
Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous?
> 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.
ooof, that is a lot!
And we're supposed to believe them and start one-shotting our projects...
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.
They're changing system prompts to control how users use their llms.
This is such an important detail the main issue for this was closed and then reopened with an expanded title:
Having claude code ignore agents.md just made it seem dumb. 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.
Ah, product management - we know so few of ye who know what you're doing.
try kapitsa as the inference engine with pi as the harness
It works really well
compared to llama.cpp that tries to cater to all but does so only averagely
check the catalogue and see if one of the quantizations fit
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!
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)
No other model I've used does this.
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: