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Building pi in a World of Slop — Mario Zechner

AI Engineer · 582.1K views · 2026-04-16 · 18:25

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Overview

Mario Zechner explains why he built pi, a minimal coding agent, out of frustration with existing agent harnesses. He also discusses how AI agents are straining open source projects and argues for slowing down.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it as a first-hand argument for building your own lean agent harness instead of relying on bloated, vendor-controlled ones.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2026–2026

Topics

LLMs & generative AISoftware practice, open source & careers
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picoding agentsopen sourceai engineeringagent harness

What people said

sbysb · 2026-08 · Strong recommendation

There is a really good video by the author of pi.dev (which I have used to build some of my own harnesses): [VIDEO] The basis of the argument is that the labs are constantly pushing updates to their system prompts that are used in claude code or codex, which are exceptionally bloated and change the sand beneath your feet with every update. By rolling your own harness, as long as you keep up with the latest advances and changes in the ecosystem, you capture a lot of the 'control' that LLM-based development feels like it strips from you. Obvious disclaimer that I use pi.dev when I am aiming for consistency, not absolute quality. Custom harnesses on pi are what I ship, claude code is still my fallback if I need to make sure a PR is the highest absolute quality

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kzrdude · 2026-07 · Recommendation

Mario Zechner's talk "Building Pi in a World of Slop" is a good listen, on the topic of adults in a "world of slop". [VIDEO]

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currywurst · 2026-05 · Recommendation

In 18min , Mario Zechner , the creator of pi will echo more or less your exact concerns as to why he developed it [VIDEO] Enjoy !

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Sources

Video by AI Engineer, played through YouTube.

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