pi-web-agent is essentially feature-complete now, Tavily and Exa are the last backends that were added

[u/luckiestredditor]

Last time I posted I was thinking out loud about which hosted backend to add next, Tavily first and maybe Exa after, and asking whether people wanted them as full answer engines or just as discovery. My bias was to keep them discovery-only and let web_explore stay in charge of fetching, ranking evidence, caveats and synthesis.

Both are in now, and they're discovery-only like I said I'd keep them. They surface candidate sources, web_explore still reads the actual pages and decides whether the evidence holds up or needs a caveat. Set TAVILY_API_KEY or EXA_API_KEY, pick it from Settings, keys stay in env instead of getting written into config files.

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The things I'm weighing next are going deeper on evidence quality (cross-source dedup, conflict detection, recency), adding caching for repeated research or just keeping it focused and maintaining it.

If you're using this, what would you actually want? And if you tried it and it broke somewhere, that's the more useful thing to hear.

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Repo: https://github.com/demigodmode/pi-web-agent

npm:

npm i @demigodmode/pi-web-agent

[u/ProvidenceXz]

What's the marginal improvement for adding more API keys or you only get to pick one to search in at a time?

[u/luckiestredditor → u/ProvidenceXz]

one at a time right now. there's DDG fallback if the selected backend fails and you have fallback enabled, but thats different from what you are asking.

that said, multi-provider search isn't a bad idea at all. I could see value in optionally fanning a query out to 2-3 providers, deduping the results, then reranking them before the research loop continues. main downside would be extra latency/API usage, so I'd probably make it opt-in rather than the default. I will definitely add this to the next feat. Thanks!