I use it for triaging my messages and emails and reminding me how all of it ties together. It uses Obsidian to know where to put stuff and how to connect information. It isn't perfect. It's very slow (using a 32GB M2 Max) but fast enough for my needs.
A good example of how it's helpful is that it will make certain things relatively frictionless. Like, I need to pay property taxes. I hate this stuff. I got the email reminder from my municipality and it made an entry in my TODOs which points to page with instructions to pay the taxes, including my folio and access numbers for when I log in. That was taken from the email and a document which contains past property tax information. I have it all there, but it compiles relevant data into dedicated TODO pages.
I'm so bad at doing all of this myself. I really don't enjoy it. Send me to buy a carrot at the store and I'll happily walk 30 minutes there and back to do it. It isn't the effort so to speak; it's how unrewarding, inefficient, and bureaucratic it all is. I'm allergic to it. Why isn't it baked into my income taxes? Why are we still doing this?
Sometimes it does a really bad job of making TODOs. Like my wife messaged me about what our dinner plan was, so Qwen went ahead and made a plan for chicken meatball soup based on messages from a week earlier. It totally fabricated the recipe. Yet, I don't know, it was still helpful to be reminded that I'm in charge of dinner.
It's probably best at scaffolding responses to emails I don't want to send. I will write it, but I appreciate basic information being fleshed out so I can write it without jumping around looking for files or numbers or whatever constantly.
I use it with a custom harness. It could be a lot better. Everything about it could be better. The model is remarkably good for its size and price, though.
Letting Sonnet 4.6 do it instead always yields much better results, much faster, but it's kind of like using a new phone vs a super old one. They can both get you there. The sound quality and camera might be worse, it doesn't look as fancy, but the new one is $1200 and the old one is free on marketplace if you're handy with a screwdriver and a fresh battery. Sounds great to me
Worth noting: this was all vibe-coded using Opus 4.6 and 4.7. It's the only project I've built that is strictly vibe-coded. It's simultaneously exciting and disgusting. I'm not sure if I'll ever 'software engineer' it, or I'll just let it be slop. It works.
Pi has optimizations as well, and development is quite active.
We are literally months into this new frontier. Mainstream harnesses are not far off from a minimal + extensible open alternative.
You don’t have to build your own plugins, as you can simply install an existing plugin that does what the mainstream harnesses do. Folks are already making the same functionality, but with more control to the user.
If you are a builder, like many reading this thread, pi is the way to go. Pi already gives you the tools to leverage LLMs to assist with building plugins, if that’s the way you want to go.
That's like arguing that you should spend your time tuning your IDE. How does that relate to end-user value created?
Yes, you built yourself a nice little utility.
Meanwhile, you wasted those tokens and time that could have been spent building actual, useful software instead of hobby tinkering your harness.
It's like thinking your sneaker tread design is going to make the difference between you and someone who just goes out there and runs everyday. The person that just runs is going to win the race every time while you 3D print the perfect tread design optimized for you running style...and don't actually run.
If you want to produce better results at running, you just run and optimize the externalities (gear) later. Same here: you have a magical software production factory and the only thing you want to use it for is your hobby tweaking of your perfect harness instead of...just making useful software.
Why would taking the more open, minimalist, configurable and ultimately diligent route means you won't be working on anything else?? Not to mention that pi has other advantages over Claude and Codex, read up on it. Also, improvements to the agent itself will pay more dividends the earlier they are applied. The tone of this message is waaaay off.
> Why would taking the more open, minimalist, configurable and ultimately diligent route means you won't be working on anything else??
You're using the same finite pool of time and tokens. Why waste your time with the perfect gear instead of focusing on just getting really good at running? Just go run and when you've pushed the limits and the gear becomes the difference, then optimize the gear to get to the next level.
While you're busy trying to optimize your harness, others are just building and shipping with the magical software factory.
What are these "others" shipping, slopware? Agents are not a "magical software factory", they are a tool with a lot of limitations, but which can speed up development in a sustainable way, when used wisely. And that includes configuring it in a way that complements the other tools in our toolkit.
Everyone's waking up to this simple truth: vibe coding like there's not tomorrow accumulates conceptual and technical debt at a unsustainable rate. Then when the "magical factory" gets mired in its own mess, it's back to the drawing board. This is the also what the makers of pi have discovered, if you listen to their talks about how pi came about. I don't believe there are any justification for the assumptions you make about their approach, nor am I seeing you presenting any either. As it is, you take just feels peevish and unfair, to be honest.
A story to share: friend vibe coded absolute slop with Replit starting late 2024 (!!). Absolute trash code. Hacked multiple times because his login code exposed the full user list on the FE (!!!). Hacker found a way to exploit his account confirmation email because it was all front-end and sent an email to every customer telling them he was hacked. One time called me up in a panic asking why his web page was randomly refreshing (turns out, he was serving it in dev mode via Vite with HMR). It was mistake after mistake after mistake.
But he started to get customers. First a handful, then a dozen, then enough to get legal threats from other vendors, and this year, his first "enterprise" deal providing software in a space that was long dominated by a duopoly of legacy providers.
Guess what he did? Just rewrote it with the latest models and hired one engineer to ensure agents followed better practices. It's a legit business now built by a tiny team using a magical software factory to produce absolute trash code, but in shipping it, he found a market and customers willing to pay him for an alternative to the duopoly.
See, at the end of the day, it's cute that you have the perfectly tuned harness, but that also means whatever time you spent tuning your harness, reading up on Pi, spending tokens on your custom plugins -- all of that time and resources could have been used just building something useful.
People use Replit to build websites too, and some of them might scratch enough of a need to make money this way. So what? Is this what I should be mightily impressed with? That some random dude vibe coded some slopware which he was able to convince some random others to pay him for? I'm personally more interested and impressed by brilliant technical achievements, even if less monetizable, than some hustle or another in some industry niche which only ever attracted the interest of two legacy players. This is Hacker News, not Hustler News after all.
Analysis by Fix the Court identified 546 gifts valued at over $4.7 million given to 18 current and former justices, with Justice Clarence Thomas as the primary recipient.
Judicial reform bills have tried to address the issue, but these bills have very little chance of success in the current political environment.
In some sense, it is quite remarkable that the institution has survived this long considering they control outcomes of such vast power while being indirectly elected, holding the post for life, and there being such a high standard for the legislature to remove them that it has never been used successfully.
Looking it up, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned from office because he accepted $20k from a chap who he was judging a case on. It reminds me of Babe Ruth's life time earnings being under a million, while Shohei Ohtani's annual pay rewound to 1931 dollars is some 3 times that.
They're probably referring to the millions of dollars of gifts Clarence Thomas received over the years, often just prior to ruling in the gift giver's favor.
Note that, when you say "ruling in the gift givers favor," we should be careful not to imply that the gift givers were involved in any Supreme Court cases. At least, not Harlan Crow, who is the big name on this topic, was not involved in a SCOTUS case during Thomas' tenure. Not sure about the other gift givers. Presumably, someone would have pointed out by now if Thomas had received gifts from a party to case, and more likely he would have already recused before that became an issue.
> we should be careful not to imply that the gift givers were involved in any Supreme Court cases
Why does this matter? I'm not involved in any SC case but if I showed up at Clarence Thomas's door with $10 asking him to rule a certain way on a case I'm interested in, it would be called bribery by any sane definition.
I didn't say it happened, I asked why you think it matters that the bribe wasn't given by someone involved in the case.
It is possible that a bribe was given by someone who is not party to the case and the comment I replied to was explaining that someone who is not party to the case was not giving a bribe, by virtue of the fact they weren't party to the case. I was hoping you could explain your perspective in the context I described but it seems I stumped you, hence the distraction about froyo and no substance in the reply.
I think we need to review what is being discussed. The comment to which I replied said:
> They're probably referring to the millions of dollars of gifts Clarence Thomas received over the years, often just prior to ruling in the gift giver's favor.
I was pointing out that, despite the implication, those gift givers were not involved in SC cases, to cast doubt on the notion that these gifts were bribes. You countered with the example of a gift giver who has an interest in a case and expresses an interest in a case being ruled a certain way. Sure, that could be a bribe. But my response emphasized that your example doesn't accurately describe what we know about the gifts from Crow.
If you read that CNBC article you will find no mention of bribery, influence peddling, or any cases that Harlan Crow had an interest in. I even took the trouble to find some case Harlan Crow might have an interest in and found this article: https://truthout.org/articles/report-harlan-crow-has-a-stake...
The links were pretty tenuous to me.
To summarize, what the CNBC article identifies is lots of gift giving. We have no evidence the giver conditioned these gifts on an understanding of ruling a certain way on particular cases. Furthermore (IIRC from reading scotusblog) the decision record on the potentially sketchy cases (Loper Bright, CFPB, Acheson Hotels, & Moore) does not reflect a significant change in Thomas' behavior in some cases, nor a diversion from the unanimous decision of the court in others.
In other words, we've not reached the question of who can be a bribe giver, because we haven't identified a bribe, as far as I can tell. But I would agree that a gift given by a nonparty can be a bribe if conditioned properly. I apologize if my initial comment gave the impression otherwise, so as to induce a kind of goalpost-moving which might be happening now. I wasn't as familiar with the details until now when I could make a stronger statement, so I began with something basic.
I'm not sure what you mean by happen "with." But, as a random online, my prediction is that nothing will happen. The whole media hubbub came and went, and IIRC Thomas slowed down the gift getting afterwards. I don't see anyone bringing suit or admin action or something.... I guess it's not impossible if and when Democrats gain control in 2028 they'll try something, but probably not, given the time separation and the desire to avoid the appearance of lawfare.
If Thomas becomes disfavored by rich conservative activists because he refuses to retire when Trump has an opportunity to safely replace him with somebody decades younger, do you think those rich conservative activists will keep spending millions of dollars on him?
And you have only one party to blame for this, it also predates all the Trump unhinged cases/decisons and even his first mandate.
Republicans simply suceeded in their plan to take over the federal judiciary branch from the top, in great part with the help of the Federalist Society.
The only answer if Democrats ever take power back is to pack the court now, no amount of unwritten rules following and norms respecting can work against people who abuse the system and packed the court themselves (by unjustifiably blocking candidates nominations which would have balanced the court, for years)
I wonder if a two-party race to the ethical bottom is the only way to fix things because if underhanded unethical tactics only benefit one party then they won't want to fix it.
Nah, it's really just Republicans doing all the corruption these days at the SUpreme Court. Unless you can provide some decent examples of Democrats. You seem to be bothsidesing the issue when McConnell stole multiple seats.
Clarence Thomas was confirmed in a very different era of politics, when the long term right wing strategy was only just beginning to take root; the vituperative rhetoric was still on the comparative fringe of talk radio; and cooperation was still the norm from both sides.
Obama should have picked a replacement for RBG. Biden and the democratic congress should have done more to get the judiciary back in line. They had their opportunities.
RBG passed away while Trump was president. Obama did pick a replacement for Antonin Scalia though: Merrick Garland. Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even give Garland a hearing arguing it was "too close to the presidential election", even though Obama's term had about one year to go.
Clarence and Alito have received gifts that would raise serious scrutiny if they were a “regular” government employee. Here’s a link to the series of articles covering this over the last few years.
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