¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Mario Zechner’s pi (via Peter Steinberger):

Mario Zechner’s pi is currently the gold-standard for differential rendering, while also using all tricks of modern terminals — including showing inline images:

This paragraph was enough to entice my curiosity to try it out.

https://shittycodingagent.ai/:

There are many shitty coding agents, but this one is mine.

Features

Minimal. Opinionated. Extensible.

Lean core keeps your context clean. Use only what you need.

This was love at first sight.

Sounds familiar?

I love its philosophy:

What we didn’t build

pi is opinionated about what it won’t do. These are intentional design decisions to minimize context bloat and avoid anti-patterns.

— No MCP. Build CLI tools with READMEs (see Skills). The agent reads them on demand. Would you like to know more? If you must, use mcporter. — No sub-agents. Spawn pi instances via tmux, or build your own sub-agent tool. Observability and steerability for you and the agent. — No permission popups. Security theater. Run in a container or build your own with Hooks. — No plan mode. Gather context in one session, write plans to file, start fresh for implementation. — No built-in to-dos. They confuse models. Use a TODO.md file, or build your own with custom tools. — No background bash. Use tmux. Full observability, direct interaction.

The full rationale is in the blog post, which is a very recommended read.

We need more of this. It is currently one of my favorite CLI agents, alongside Claude Code (the golden standard) and Amp Code.

Note that pi is model agnostic, comparable to OpenCode.