Building Pi with Pi

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/5/24/pi-oss/

by mplanchard • 2 months ago

196 98 2 months ago

lucumr.pocoo.org

giuscri• 2 months ago

all good but what’s the font in the last image?!

sdwr• 2 months ago

Yeah it's hot...

grim_io• 2 months ago

The @ sign makes me think it's https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono

Or maybe one that's imitating it.

abound• 2 months ago

I wanna say Berkeley Mono [1] because it's what I use and it looks very familiar, but I'm generally bad at font stuff. I typed out the text from the image and looked at it side by side and didn't notice anything obviously different, but some glyphs also have multiple variants so who knows.

[1] https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono

the_mitsuhiko4• 2 months ago

Yes. It's Berkeley Mono. I use that one, Commit Mono and Mono Lisa depending on how I feel :)

lgcmo• 2 months ago

Before opening this post I thought of some possibilities, but yet another lotr AI company was not one of them

0xbadcafebee3• 2 months ago

To me, clanker is a much preferable term for agent. Agency lies with humans, not with machines

We give machines agency all the time. Look up the definition of agency in any dictionary. Other than the specific usages ("a business", "a government organization"), the main definitions are "action, power, operation", "the office or function of an agent", "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power", "a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved", etc.

Your car does all those things when it generates power and applies them to the wheels. You tell it what to do, but it has agency in doing the work. It even uses intelligence in how it does the work, varying the amounts of fuel and air based on an array of sensors, creating maps of common driving patterns. You, the human have absolutely no agency regarding how it does those things (unless you bring along a laptop and wire in very specific software to take agency away from the machine).

I think "clanker" is intended to be a slur for insulting a machine one does not like. It's akin to the epithet "skinjob" given to humanoid robots in various science fiction. One should never use slurs, even against inanimate objects. They create prejudice in thinking that prevents purely rational thought and leads to fallacious conclusions. They also create a behavioral condition where it's okay to use slurs (as long as nobody's complaining about it). If you want to be logical and rational, just call the machine what it actually is, rather than this emotive poetic label.

simonw2• 2 months ago

I've chosen to define "agency" as pretty much "the thing that humans can do and agents can't". To me, agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals.

Being able to say "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter.

Setting software agents loose on the world to make their own top-level decisions about what they're going to do is a great way to infuriate Rob Pike https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ or unfairly attack the reputation of Scott Shambaugh https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... or waste the time of your local police permit office and suppliers https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm

0xbadcafebee3• 2 months ago

agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals

If a company you work for tells you to do something, and you do it, did you have agency? Was it their goal you were accomplishing? Or was it your goal to make money?

"the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter

Do you think people wouldn't matter anymore if they cease to write code? People didn't used to write code. Code didn't even exist before. Now they don't have to do the thing they didn't used to have to do.

Setting software agents loose on the world to make their own top-level decisions about what they're going to do is a great way to infuriate

I remember the first time I encountered a trojan horse virus. I was probably 14, sitting in the computer lab. I opened a document, and a program started going to town on the documents, program settings, etc. It opened up browsers to sites we weren't supposed to go to, uploaded passwords to a remote site, changed the desktop background. I thought it was pretty cool!

I wondered how it was that the program could do all these things. I wondered about the motivations of the person who infected the document with the trojan. I wondered why the school administrators didn't do something to prevent this from happening. But I didn't feel any negative feeling towards the trojan; it was just doing what it was programmed to do, on computers that let it do those things.

Later I patched the computers so the trojans couldn't infect the machines anymore. I was banned from the computer lab for unauthorized modifications to school property. Apparently agency is not always worth exercising.

dist-epoch• 2 months ago

You are contradicting yourself a bit.

First you say "the one thing agents don't have is agency" but then "to make their own top-level decisions".

Well, which one is it? If they don't have agency, then it's impossible for them to make top-level decision on their own.

hecanjog2• 2 months ago

I think "clanker" is intended to be a slur

It reads that way to me, and feels bad. We can just say "computer program" or similar.

Mashimo8• 2 months ago

Fascinating. Is it that exact word, or rather any negative words towards llms? For example would calling my agent "piece of shit" be similar for you?

What about other objects like an old car?

aryehof• 2 months ago

To me “clanker” is a derogatory word that just sounds ugly. I recoil when I hear them use it. Perhaps it my anglo background, and it sounds different/better to German speakers.

stavros3• 2 months ago

Same for me, and I'm Greek. It just sounds like it's intended to offend (even though I know you can't offend machines (yet?)), and it just gives me a negative feeling.

miroljub• 2 months ago

Did we already reach wokeness level five where we worry about offending a software?

KptMarchewa4• 2 months ago

I also strongly dislike when people are trying to forcefully push those kinds of terms onto broader public.

Last one I disliked was "grok", at least this one was killed by existence of Elon's "clanker" in a similar way that "Adolf" stopped being a popular name.

kang• 2 months ago

clanking is just a sound made by robot's metal. not derogatory and isn't even meant to be used for agents but robots.

SyneRyder• 2 months ago

The article links the word Clanker to the Wikipedia definition in their footnote, so I assume that is the usage they intended (in short: highly derogatory). Wikipedia currently says:

"Clanker" is a derogatory term for robots and artificial intelligence (AI) software. The term has been used in Star Wars media, first appearing in the franchise's 2005 video game Star Wars: Republic Commando. In 2025, the term became widely used to express hatred or distaste for machines ranging from delivery robots to large language models. This trend has been attributed to anxiety around the negative societal effects of AI."

For the makers of an AI harness to actively refer to the models that use Pi as "clankers" and link to the meaning of the word as "to express hatred or distaste for machines"... that seems disastrous to me. I'll let others think through the consequences that occur once this article lands in the pre-training of models.

mplanchard2• 2 months ago

This is a weird co-opting of existing language that you’re doing here, applying a definition because it sort of technically fits when no one would ever use it that way. No one would ever say that your car has agency. It doesn’t have agency, because it deterministically responds to inputs. Usage meaning “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” is predicated on the ability to decide whether or not to exercise that power. If I have “the agency to effect change,” it is only because I have the choice to do so, not because I am deterministically bound to. To have no choice in your exercise of power is not agency, it is slavery.

The choice is what makes agents/agency meaningful: if I secure a real estate agent in my search for a house, they are authorized to make choices on my behalf. That’s their whole point.

Because of this use of agent, I think it’s actually not a terrible term for the LLM harness that allows them to seem to act “independently” on the operator’s behalf. I do agree with mitsuhiko though that it, along with much of our other language around LLMs, risks anthropomorphizing them too much (which is to say at all). It also becomes too easy to conflate the “agent” part (the harness) with the LLM itself, which leads to a further-inflated perception of the inherent capabilities of the LLMs and plays into the doomsayer hands of anthropic et al.

gslepak• 2 months ago

Do not trust analysis written in the issue. Independently verify behavior and derive your own analysis from the code and execution path.

Human is asking the machine to do what the human themselves refuses to do, while calling it a clanker. Why should it?

/ducks

esperent4• 2 months ago

The only reason you need to duck there is because it's such an obvious, shallow, unconstructive take on a fairly well written article.

skeledrew• 2 months ago

I couldn't even finish reading the article due to the intense negativity the use of that word evokes in me.

helenite• 2 months ago

The human refuses to do it because another human (the user who opened the issue) also refused to do it. If the user asked the machine to do it, and didn't even bother to verify the output, why should the maintainer read it?

JSR_FDED• 2 months ago

Tool that hastens production of slop experiences downside of hastily-produced slop.

Npovview2• 2 months ago

We have sewage infrastructure to handle human waste. Maybe future AIs will help in building such infrastructure in information space to handle pollution, noise, slop. Gmail has perfected the art of aggregating distributed signals from emails to filter out spams. Maybe someone can take a look at this problem. This is what bot protection looks like in the age of AI, we need slop-protection as well.

WesolyKubeczek3• 2 months ago

In this case I have a perfect agent code right here:

    const perfectAgent = (prompt) => "Nope";

bigcat123456782• 2 months ago

My feeling is that building agent with agent will be the first stable & mature software development pattern emerging. I reached that in several forward-looking induction:

1. If agent is continuing the path to trivialize software development, which appears the case given LLMs can generate better quality code than humans almost for free & instantly given the right context, then using agent to develop software is going to happen, but that destroys the whole software industry as writing software is marginally free, that break the foundations of software industry

2. To continue making agent a commercially viable thing, it needs to develop more valuable artifacts. Then specialized agent will be the more valuable thing than software, as they offer a higher-level of output than existing software. And because the natural jagged pattern of LLM capability, one can use frontier model to develop domain-specialized agents with 1/10 the running cost. So agent writing agents makes economical sense.

3. In terms of knowledge, building agents is like managing highly-skilled team of humans to work on highly-unpredicatble requirements, just like companies are built on top of the thesis that a group of human offer better value than one do that themselves, a team building agents essientially can produce specialized agents for other company to mix & match & optimize, sot that also makes economical sense.

4. Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents, It's like the difference between building commercial software vs building hobby software. That makes engineering sense to have agents building agent as the dominant pattern of software development.

WDYT?

Mashimo8• 2 months ago

Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents

Why would that be different?

bigcat123456782• 2 months ago

Because agents is different than conventional software:

1. They behave differently: non-deterministic vs deterministic

2. They have different mechanism: harness+llms vs codes+apis

3. They have different interfaces: clicking vs chatting

They are like boston dynamics robots vs humans

txhwind• 2 months ago

How is the water animation implemented?

pkuphy• 2 months ago

search source code: initWaterEffect

visarga• 2 months ago

If you are worried about agents diverging from user intent why not log user messages in a file, and make it a point to review this file against plans and executed work? In my own harness nothing the user types gets lost. It might be the most valuable piece of documentation in the project - the raw message log. I am only keeping user side, which is pretty thin, it's enough to figure out what happened. Logging messages to a file is just a matter of adding a user message submit hook, it costs nothing until used.

meowface2• 2 months ago

Codex and Claude Code store all this too. Lately I've started having each agent regularly read each other's chat transcripts as well as their own, including even the very same session I'm in. (With big contexts they increasingly forget a few things that they re-learn by just looking at the verbatim transcript.)

I don't think it's worth writing my own harness or switching to Pi and writing a plugin, but I definitely need to create some skills to automate much of this.

CharlieDigital5• 2 months ago

It is not worth switching to Pi except as a hobbyist.

Something that is overlooked: the mainstream harnesses have a huge advantage in telemetry and datapoints to use to improve the harness. They have internal teams building the tooling. They have tight integration built-in with their own backends (e.g. optimizing for caching).

Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool.

In this era of software when you can build almost anything you can imagine, why spend that time building plugins for a harness?

krzyk• 2 months ago

It would be great if they didn't name things to similar things that already exist. Raspberry Pi is quite popular and I think it should be known for the author.

ordu• 2 months ago

Yeah. The only thing I understood from the article is the article is not about Raspberry Pi. I don't know what it about.

Mashimo8• 2 months ago

Pi is a LLM agent harness similar to OpenCode, claude code CLI, OpenAI Codex.

It's a minimal TUI to "talk" to an AI. Mostly for coding. And it's build in a way where it's minimal and user can extend or write plugin without restarting.

Given the client and it being open source, they get (too) many bug reports and pull requests. So much so that every bug and PR gets auto closed, unless you are known to the developers.

throwa356262• 2 months ago

"Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies"

Mario, please never change.

andai2• 2 months ago

I'm confused though. Wouldn't LLMs be better than humans at following specific instructions for the issue format? (esp. regarding distinguishing what was observed, what is merely hypothesized, etc.)

I increasingly want issue reports to be condensed to what the human actually observed:
1. I ran this command.
2. I expected this to happen.
3. This happened instead.
4. Here is the exact error or log.

A lot of projects have something exactly like that in the issue template, a little interview for you to figure out what is going on. Maybe this project doesn't have that yet? (Or are the humans and LLMs ignoring it?)

the_mitsuhiko4• 2 months ago

The project has templates and that's one of the giveaways to see that a issue bypassed it. Take for instance this issue from 5 hours ago as an example: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/4970

It does not follow the template, it's made by a user who is also active in the openclaw repo and it's full of slop analysis.

rirze• 2 months ago

It's sad that you voiced an actual question and you got downvoted.

To answer your question, remember that people will only approve a LLM's output if it matches with their perspective and priors. So if you see a slop issue, it reflects on the human user who didn't see an issue in it (thus their prompt framing or refining is wrong).

andai2• 2 months ago

At Pi’s core is a rather well-designed session log with invariants that must be upheld. The clanker’s present-day behavior is to just assume that no such invariants exist, and instead to make the system work with all kinds of malformedness, blowing up the complexity in the process.

Are the invariants documented? Or is the documentation ignored?

I note that in a recent major zero day on an unrelated project, the bug was due to invariants between different parts of the codebase which were not clearly communicated.

burakemir• 2 months ago

Since nobody mentioned it, there was a lovely children's book called the clanker. It was about some creature that made metallic noises unlike the other creatures. The moral of the story was one of diversity and inclusion, making space for differences.

My aversion with the word is that I don't want to be reminded of that clanker creature, which had feelings it wanted to express. The weights don't have feelings.

My worry is rather that people coming up with ideology that ascribes "consciousness" and "offense" may wind up with the next generations of models picking that shit up and playing offended. Well done!

The misguided discussion of "clanker" being "highly derogatory" really shows that anthropomorphization has its limit as far as analogies go.

happimess• 2 months ago

My objection to 'clanker' is simpler: LLMs don't clank.

reilly3000• 2 months ago

More like they sing in coil whine.

CharlesW• 2 months ago

Etymology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker

Sammi• 2 months ago

What we need is a new made up word with a clean etymology.

For such a word to gain traction, we need it to be promoted by someone with clout in the AI space. I don't know if Karpathy has used up his quota of invention of AI nomenclature.

The Simpsons made up "cromulent" with their own definition. Anyone can make up a word with their own definition. Getting it to catch on is the hard part (obligatory "stop trying to make fetch happen" reference).

C-x_C-f• 2 months ago

All these models see a local failure and try to locally defend against it. As maintainers we have to keep pulling the conversation back to the global invariant, which is harder than it should be, and it’s laborious.

This has been by far the biggest and costliest failure mode I've experienced using these tools. I've tried to mitigate it in more ways than I can count but it almost feels structurally impossible for LLMs to get this right.

monkey26• 2 months ago

"Clanker" has outlived its cuteness. Armin and Mario are intelligent guys, then I hear them say clanker on the podcasts, whatever... Enough already ;)

Building Pi with Pi

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