Comment by manmal

Comment by manmal 5 days ago

22 replies

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- Peter has spent the last year building up a large assortment of CLIs to integrate with. He‘s also a VERY good iOS and macOS engineer so he single handedly gave clawd capabilities like controlling macOS and writing iMessages.

- Leaning heavily on the SOUL.md makes the agents way funnier to interact with. Early clawdbot had me laugh to tears a couple times, with its self-deprecating humor and threatening to play Nickelback on Peter‘s sound system.

- Molt is using pi under the hood, which is superior to using CC SDK

- Peter’s ability to multitask surpasses anything I‘ve ever seen (I know him personally), and he’s also super well connected.

Check out pi BTW, it’s my daily driver and is now capable to write its own extensions. I wrote a git branch stack visualizer _for_ pi, _in_ pi in like 5 minutes. It’s uncanny.

piffey 5 days ago

I've been really curious about pi and have been following it but haven't seen a reason to switch yet outside anecdotes. What makes it a better daily driver out of the box compared to Claude or Codex? What did you end up needing to add to get your workflow to be "now capable to write its own extensions"? Just trying to see what the benefit would be if I hop into a new tool.

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  • manmal 5 days ago

    Why don’t you try it, it’s 2 minutes to setup (or tell Claude to do it), and it uses your CC Max sub if you want.

    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.

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    • VadimPR 5 days ago

      Using your CC Max account for this seems like a good way to get your account banned, as it's against the ToS and Anthropic has started enforcing this.

      Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only legal way to use pi is to use an API, and that's enormously expensive.

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      • manmal 4 days ago

        Sure, I'm not using it with my company/enterprise account for that reason. But for my private sub, it's worth the tradeoff/risk. Ethically I see no issue at all, because those LLMs are trained on who knows what.

        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?

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chrisjj 5 days ago

> He‘s also a VERY good iOS and macOS engineer so he single handedly gave clawd capabilities like controlling macOS

Surely a very good engineer would not be so foolish.

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  • manmal 4 days ago

    Problem of definition, you're conflating good with cautious, I would not.

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saberience 5 days ago

It’s vibe coded slop that could be made by anyone with Claude Code and a spare weekend.

It didn’t require any skill, it’s all written by Claude. I’m not sure why you’re trying to hype up this guy, if he didn’t have Claude he couldn’t have made this, just like non engineers all over the world are coding all a variety of shit right now.

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  • biddit 5 days ago

    I’ve been following Peter and his projects 7-8 months now and you fundamentally mischaracterize him.

    Peter was a successful developer prior to this and an incredibly nice guy to boot, so I feel the need to defend him from anonymous hate like this.

    What is particularly impressive about Peter is his throughput of publishing *usable utility software*. Over the last year he’s released a couple dozen projects, many of which have seen moderate adoption.

    I don’t use the bot, but I do use several of his tools and have also contributed to them.

    There is a place in this world for both serious, well-crafted software as well as lower-stakes slop. You don’t have to love the slop, but you would do well to understand that there are people optimizing these pipelines and they will continue to get better.

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  • manmal 4 days ago

    Weekend - certainly not, the scope is massive. All those CLIs - gmail, whisper, elevenlabs, whatsapp/telegram/discord/etc, obsidian, generic skills marketplace etc, it's just so many separate APIs to build against.

    But Peter just said in his TBPN interview that you can likely re-build all that in 1 month. Maybe you'd need to work 14h per day like he does, and running 10 codex sessions in parallel, using 4-6 OpenAI Pro subs.

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