Working with Pi Coding Agents

Most coding agents compete on how much they do for you. Claude Code manages sub-agents, plan mode, and permission flows out of the box. Cursor wraps an entire IDE around the model. The pitch is always some version of "more capability, less setup." Pi does the opposite, and says so directly in its own documentation: no MCP, no sub-agents, no plan mode, no permission popups, no built-in to-do lists, no background bash. Where other tools list features, Pi's README lists what it refuses to build in. That's an unusual thing for a product to lead with, and it's worth testing. So this article does exactly that. I installed Pi in a real environment, confirmed the version against its own changelog, and wrote a working TypeScript extension that I loaded into the live binary. Node.js 22 or newer, npm, and a terminal Pi was built by Mario Zechner, a developer also known for his work on libGDX, who published a long, unusually candid essay in November 2025 explaining why he built it. His argument was structural: mainstream coding harnesses inject context you can't see, change their behavior between releases without much warning, and give you limited visibility into what the model…