Why not use Claude Code/Cursor directly, but instead create a minimalist AI Coding Agent tailored to your needs from scratch? What is the specific implementation process? This technical blog post from @badlogicgames details an open-source project called Pi—an AI programming agent he created specifically for himself, embodying an "extremely minimalist" approach. His viewpoint can be summarized as follows: in today's world of increasingly bloated AI-assisted programming tools, returning to "transparency, controllability, and simplicity" is the ultimate goal for experienced developers. Why make this wheel? Mario was once a heavy user of Cursor and Claude Code, but he gradually became dissatisfied with these commercial tools, mainly for three reasons: • Overly functional: He described Claude Code as "a giant spaceship with only 20% of its functions being useful". • Uncontrollable (black box): Frequent updates to the System Prompt by commercial tools can cause workflows that worked yesterday to suddenly become unusable today. Furthermore, tools often hide the specific context they send to the AI. • Lack of transparency: For example, Claude Code's "Plan Mode" runs through invisible sub-agents, so developers cannot see what the AI is thinking or intervene in its decision-making path. What is pi? pi is a command-line (CLI) programming agent written in Node.js/TypeScript. • Positioning: It is not an IDE like Cursor, but a "Copilot" that runs in the terminal. Features: Extremely "stubborn" and minimalist. It doesn't try to please users with a complex UI, but focuses on efficient context management. Core Design Philosophy A. Emphasis on "contextual engineering" Mario believes that the success or failure of AI programming does not depend on how powerful the model is, but on how precise the context you can feed it. Pi introduces a hierarchical AGENTS.md file system. You can place a global rule in the project root directory and rules for specific modules in subdirectories. AI will automatically read these rules. This is much more efficient than repeating "Please use TypeScript" in the chat box every time. B. The minimalist approach to toolsets differs from the comprehensive toolchains of currently popular MCPs; Pi only provides AI with four essential tools: • read: Read a file. • bash: Executes shell commands (this is the most powerful tool; AI can use it to invoke any script, compiler, or test). • edit: Modify the file. • write: Creates a file. Mario believes that as long as Bash can run, the Agent has the whole world at its disposal, without the need for additional complex plugins. C. Reject "magic," embrace "visibility" • No implicit operations: Users can see every step the Agent performs and every API call made. • The joy of manual mode: Supports seamless model switching within a single session (e.g., use the inexpensive GPT-4o-mini for simple code scanning, and switch to the expensive Claude 3.5 Sonnet midway through to solve a difficult problem, without interrupting the context). Read the original blog post
