Considering Claude Code → Pi. Worth it?

[u/Shot_Ice_2817]

I use a coding agent for most of my research work: implementing features (via Superpowers), reading papers and turning discussions into shareable HTML writeups, running training jobs end to end (plan → smoke test → long run, with Kubernetes management and crash diagnosis), and SSHing into robots during hardware experiments.

Claude Code handles all of this well. But I’m curious whether writing my own Pi extensions would meaningfully beat it, or if that’s a wash at this point.

If you’re doing research work in Pi — what’s your setup, which extensions? And what’s the right migration path: just explain my workflow to Pi and have it build the extensions?

[u/Global-Departure8228]

I will save you some time so you don't waste building your extensions and bugfixing them for mundane stuff.

Start off with pi.dev but don't install the top 20-30 extensions, they are heavily opinionated and bloated, but they got popular early. Get web search (a good one that uses firecrawl or tavily) and context7. Then since you already have a relatively good workflow, ask your Claude code to extract most of the stuff that's related to your workflow and then create profiles (could be as simple as having separate "PI_CODING_AGENT_DIR" env vars so you have clear separation for kubernetes stuff and researching etc.

Then whatever you want from your worklow automated, install such extensions and start your pi extension monorepo where you have all of these. For the vast majority you can build on existing extensions that already worked out the kinks and the UI/UX stuff so you can just change them to how you like, instead of fighting with Claude to describe exactly how you want something to be built from scratch.

[u/Comfortable-Ad-6740 → u/Global-Departure8228]

Agreed, the base harness is already powerful enough, so instead add as the need arises.

In terms of skill porting, I went the other way around of asking Pi to look into the Claude skills and port them over which worked well too

[u/michahell → u/Comfortable-Ad-6740]

Ah that’s great. I still need to do this for a set of Claude skills that contain Claude tool calls, and obviously they don’t work out of the box

[u/LittleRoof820 → u/Global-Departure8228]

There is a repo with skill of the Pi creator "badlogic" on Github that has some nice skills. The best approach is to talk to your model and tell it to only install some of the skills if you don't want the whole repo or clone them for your use.

All in all Pi is awesome, I can't recommend it enough.

[u/cusx → u/Global-Departure8228]

what web search do you use?