anaqin

Recently I started using pi as a harness and its flexibility has really changed the way I think about UI into agents. It feels like I took the red pill and have been liberated from the prescriptive nature of CC or codex. Instead of getting told here’s how you should approach ___, I pay much more attention to my workflows and when I feel friction I make the harness adapt and smooth it out.

For example, there are no shortage of web based uis for pi and they are all cool but I wanted a deep integration between artifacts and how I want to collaborate with the agent on them. So i built my own ui that mirrors what the pi tui sees. It’s chat based but has a deep integration with a GitHub style code review UI so I can leave review and comments whenever I want. Every agent message renders nicely in an annotatable markdown viewer so I don’t need an ask question tool and can more naturally get the agent on the same page as me. I want it to feel like I’m working with a colleague.

I don’t think these features are too unique but having full control over the experience is really nice. Flexibility over model provider, can tailor it to my work’s dev stack, and don’t need to worry about anyone breaking it with a million updates everyday.

Your perfect workflow can be realized in a day or so. You just need to go make it happen.

I dunno… I’m finding myself yearning for some emojis, a dedicated marketing web site, and a bunch of incomprehensible paragraphs that lack any soul.

Your post went into way more depth than I was expecting when I first opened up it up. You clearly spent a lot of time on it and I appreciated reading the tale so thank you. Given all the drama around AK / Bun, it just would have been so funny to see someone not involved in the project solve one of the main motivations for the move to rust.

I believe there is a fork of bun from 1.3 that a different community is maintaining. I wonder if they’ve been able to get the compile times down by modularizing the build?

Good write up! I was hoping it was going to conclude with the author getting buns zig build way faster than Rusts but a good deep dive nevertheless

I think I was imprecise in my last message. When GitHub actions has an outage, engineers at my company can and do still write code. No one can merge though and we aren’t able to deploy (like we normally do) so we very quickly get a huge backlog of PRs that need to be tested / reviewed etc. People generally just pivot towards reviewing code at this point (or doing other non coding work)

When GH has an outage like yesterday, we cant even formally review code. Sure, people could pull others branches and read them and discuss in chat but a dedicated tool for distributed code review is pretty important for most teams. It wasn’t that long ago we were a small company and GH’s reliability wasn’t such a nightmare so using it for what it offers made a lot of sense for the business.

The calculus has changed recently.

> If you have a dev team with 500 members and the team has been on GitHub for 10 years

This so closely describes my company. We’re so fed up with GHA that we’re charting an off ramp. It’s been happening in the background for a few months already but whenever there is a major outage I swear we add one more person to effort.

Migrating sucks but so does having 500 engineers who can’t do any coding work for a day every {month,week}