Some advantages:
- Faster because it does no extra Haiku inference for every prompt (Anthropic does this for safety it seems)
- Extensions & skills can be hot reloaded. Pi is aware of its own docs so you just tell it „build an extension that does this and that“. Things like sub agents or chains of sub agents are easily doable. You could probably make a Ralph workflow extension in a few minutes if you think that’s a good idea.
- Tree based history rewind (no code rewind but you could make an extension for that easily)
- Readable session format (jsonl) - you can actually DO things with your session files like analysis or submit it along with a PR. People have workflows around this already. Armin Ronacher liked asking pi about other user’s sessions to judge quality.
- No flicker because Mario knows his TUI stuff. He sometimes tells the CC engs on X how they could fix their flicker but they don’t seem to listen. The TUI is published separately as well (pi-tui) and I‘ve been implementing a tailing log reader based on it - works well.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only legal way to use pi is to use an API, and that's enormously expensive.
But you can use pi with z.ai or any of the other cheap Claude-distilled providers for a couple bucks per month. Just calculate the risk that your data might be sold I guess?