I guess it's the same kinda friction with vanilla vim/neovim vs vim 'distributions' that provide a bunch of stuff out of the box.

From my limited time using pure Pi, I found quite a few of the plugins lacking and had no desire to upgrade/fix and maintain them myself. I know others feel differently though.

I like the idea of keep Pi minimal but having “official”, high quality optional plugins to make it more usable.

People really need to try out “less is more”. The new models are quite smart, so suffocating their context with dozens of MCPs and skills isn’t necessary like it used to be. A cli tool with good built in help and good errors is amazingly easy for the model to figure out.

If Pi is too minimal for you and you don’t want to dig into it, OpenCode is pretty good out of the box. I use it for general work I haven’t setup Pi for. The only thing I add to OpenCode is some commands that are shortcuts to save me typing frequent prompts, and a subagent with a fixed model for implementing changes.

I have little to none and am successful building full stack Go apps Claude Code, Codex, and Shelley which covers the spectrum of crazy black box to simple `bash` clanker.

It makes me think the models are continually improving in knowing what to do on their own.

I do put some major work into the classic "Developer Experience" (DX) of my code base. Standard Go tooling, idiomatic Go, well designed initial test harnesses, GitHub actions that enforce some linting.

I think that works better than any markdown instructions ever will.

What, no kitchen sink?

But I like pi precisely because it is so minimal. I want understand and work around the simplest possible agentic coding setup, find the sharp edges, maybe even improve my prompting ability. And doing all three with a locally hosted LLM.

At some point, if I don't understand the foundations, am I just punting on actually thinking about what I'm doing?

Of course, making individual choices about how to do agentic coding are precisely just making individual choices. People should do what makes them happy and productive.

  Curated. Not exhaustive.

  Every package is hand-picked.

Anyway, if this works for someone, great. I’m a novice Pi user which I think would be the target audience, I don’t see why I would use this, both because it appears to be LLM slop and because it bedazzles up a tool that I started using in the first place because of its minimalism, but to each his own.