Pi 1.0 Ships Minimal, Pi Durable Ships Everything Else
Most coding agents add features every week. Pi waited months to add five. Earendil shipped Pi 1.0 on October 1 and it hit 451 points on Hacker News. Pi already has hundreds of thousands of weekly users, and the team's rule is to adopt something only after it has proven itself elsewhere. The list of things they tried and dropped is longer than the list they kept.
What made it in: Codemode, with native support for MCP and for non-LLM models like Jev and image models. Extensions can now define virtual models. There is cache warming for Anthropic models, system messages that can change prompts and tools mid-conversation, and full-screen mode by default. The launch demo shows the point. Pi writes itself an extension, a virtual model that plans with Claude Opus and implements with GPT. A Jev decision model watches the transcript and decides when planning is done and it is time to switch. Then /session breaks down cost and cache use per model. That is a model router built from three different kinds of model, as an extension, in one session.
Pi Durable is the bigger idea, and it ships as an experimental package. Pi the coding agent assumes one person, one terminal, and a process you restart by hand when it dies. Pi Durable is for agents that run indefinitely, survive crashes, can be reached from different surfaces, and can be steered by several people at once. The harness opens over a storage backend: memory, SQLite and JSONL ship in the box, along with a conformance suite for writing your own. The SQLite and JSONL code uses no Node APIs, so with a small adapter it runs on Bun or inside a Cloudflare Durable Object. Only the working set lives in memory. And the whole framework is about 15,000 lines, roughly 150k tokens for GPT or 250k for Claude, small enough for your agent to read the source of the harness it runs in.
The awkward footnote landed the day before. A Figma staffer confirmed that Figma's remote MCP server only accepts clients on an approved list, and Pi is not on it. Open protocol, closed door. As more SaaS companies allowlist which agent clients may connect, harnesses like Pi will need either a seat on every list or a way around them.
Both packages are MIT licensed. Docs at pi.dev, code at github.com/earendil-works/pi.
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What made it in: Codemode, with native support for MCP and for non-LLM models like Jev and image models. Extensions can now define virtual models. There is cache warming for Anthropic models, system messages that can change prompts and tools mid-conversation, and full-screen mode by default. The launch demo shows the point. Pi writes itself an extension, a virtual model that plans with Claude Opus and implements with GPT. A Jev decision model watches the transcript and decides when planning is done and it is time to switch. Then /session breaks down cost and cache use per model. That is a model router built from three different kinds of model, as an extension, in one session.
Pi Durable is the bigger idea, and it ships as an experimental package. Pi the coding agent assumes one person, one terminal, and a process you restart by hand when it dies. Pi Durable is for agents that run indefinitely, survive crashes, can be reached from different surfaces, and can be steered by several people at once. The harness opens over a storage backend: memory, SQLite and JSONL ship in the box, along with a conformance suite for writing your own. The SQLite and JSONL code uses no Node APIs, so with a small adapter it runs on Bun or inside a Cloudflare Durable Object. Only the working set lives in memory. And the whole framework is about 15,000 lines, roughly 150k tokens for GPT or 250k for Claude, small enough for your agent to read the source of the harness it runs in.
The awkward footnote landed the day before. A Figma staffer confirmed that Figma's remote MCP server only accepts clients on an approved list, and Pi is not on it. Open protocol, closed door. As more SaaS companies allowlist which agent clients may connect, harnesses like Pi will need either a seat on every list or a way around them.
Both packages are MIT licensed. Docs at pi.dev, code at github.com/earendil-works/pi.
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