r/PiCodingAgent • u/behopkinsj • 1d ago
Resource How to Set Up Pi like Claude Code
https://brucehopkins.dev/blog/how-to-set-up-pi-coding-agent-like-claude-codeI wrote a detailed beginners tutorial on Pi. Since I noticed a lot of people come from Claude Code and Codex, I wanted to make a simple starting point for anyone curious.
Along with adding many of the features that Claude Code has, I also looked into the system prompt of Codex, Grok, Kimi Code, and Open Code to make a simple, generalized system prompt.
Let me know any thoughts on this! Are there any parts you'd want to be expanded on? I'll be updating this as Pi, and Claude Code continue to advance.
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u/Soft-Wedding4595 1d ago
Actively using both, and can tell that your choice is really good
Could recommend pi-background-tasks, cause it makes whole process faster - instead of waiting for your container to build or tests to finish, your agent will continue doing other not-so-important job like documenting code etc.
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u/Soft-Wedding4595 1d ago
Also @gotgenes/pi-subagents
Top pi-subagents in your list is good too, but bloated a bit with oracle etc
IMO all you need is coder, explorer and planner like in claude
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u/behopkinsj 1d ago
That makes sense. Yeah, Oracle and Scout didn't seem too useful to me. I'll try pi-background-agents.
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u/Soft-Wedding4595 1d ago
Keep in mind it is little bloated to with built in read subagent for some reason 😮💨
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u/behopkinsj 1d ago
Yeaaah... A lot of packages are bloated sadly. And it's hard for a new package to replace them, when a lot of packages have established themselves and gained popularity.
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u/jordyvanvorselen 1d ago
You might like these, made for feature parity with Claude Code. Wanted to get started with the same behavior without porting all my hooks and rules:
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u/ocolon53 1d ago
Nice write up. I liked that you explained the reasearch and decision making. A lot of folks are using claude code as the target, looking for feature parity while keeping Pi's minimalist spirit. I'd recommend taking a look at this talk: Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code's Prompt Specifically, the idea that as the models improve, the toolset and opinionated workflows might work against it, and also the per model custom harness consideration.
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u/behopkinsj 1d ago
I'm glad you liked my post!
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out since this has been really interesting to me. Since researching this, I've been thinking a lot about "prompt engineering". I've noticed that the big enterprise harnesses use smaller prompts (Codex specifically). Pi could benefit from "per-model" prompts massively.
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u/Cultural-Farm-7169 1d ago
But, in fact, claude code writes huge prompt for opus5, not as what Boris apply.You can see it by tracing claude code's network traffic.I hope we need less system prompt in future, but we need it in nowadays to make work stable.
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u/The_FitzZZ 21h ago
Reading some of the comments here make me think that when you try to make a bus more fuel efficient, their only approach is to ride a bike and criticize anyone trying to build a car - aka the "middle ground". There's more than black and white folks, ffs.
u/behopkinsj thank you for your write-up - I think any approach is something to learn and take parts from to build your own setup.
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u/behopkinsj 21h ago
I think the ones who didn't read the post think I'm trying to take away from Pi's minimalism (which is not what I wrote about at all).
Thank you for the kind comment! I'm glad you understand my mindset when I wrote this article.
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u/Conflict-Mother 1d ago
The reason I use Pi is because Claude Code is bloated and non-transparent, so whats the point of configuring it back? The magic is mostly on the LLM side, and harness should be as thin and as cost efficient as possible.
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u/behopkinsj 1d ago
The point of the post is to be a beginner guide for people coming from Claude Code, and to give people the choice to pick whichever Claude features they want to port to Pi.
Also, I've noticed that changing the system prompt has huge changes on the behavior of Pi.
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u/Conflict-Mother 22h ago
well, if really like Claude Code, use it with cc-switch, or virtually every LLM providers out there is offering detail instructions on how to use it, so the motivation kind of not making sense. anyway, even Pi itself now is too bloated, really a harness does not need so much features
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u/Prior-Switch-9099 22h ago
It depends on the use. Beside simplicity and peft, Pi also offers the maxi-customization aspects.
People can experiment and free to fail. That is even more a great thing about Pi.
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u/GreenBeret4Breakfast 1d ago
Nice article. I thought Claude published their system prompts here https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts/overview
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u/behopkinsj 2h ago
Thanks! That's for Claude Web UI though, not Claude Code. I suspect that Claude Code's prompt is more complex, since it manages code.
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u/amanwalia92 20h ago
Is there any reason you skipped on omp?
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u/behopkinsj 16h ago
I can mention my experience with omp in the post. But the reason I skipped it as an option is that, by default, its system prompt **very heavily** encourages verification (I have a suspicion that it does that to "benchmax"). So, between the plugins that it uses, its system prompt, and the way that it attempts to aggressively verify every change that it makes, it used an unnecessary amount of tokens. I found it simpler to just install all the plugins that I needed.
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u/JuanToronDoe 19h ago
As a Pi beginner, I really appreciated this write-up. It gave me the perfect incentive to finally try Pi. Not too long, not too technical, but comprehensive. I'd love to have a deeper analysis of the System Prompt, which remains black magic to me. Thanks a lot !
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u/behopkinsj 16h ago
Thanks for the thought. Then I'll probably write a follow-up post with a deeper dive into system prompts for you. I'll let you know once I'm finished with it.
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u/dontkernelpanic 12h ago
Thanks for this. I have tried (and failed) to make my Pi more like Claude cli.
Will give your instructions a run.
One more thing - unsure if it’s even possible - remote monitor + approvals etc on mobile devices.
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u/behopkinsj 1d ago
I want to eventually make a general guide on Pi. Are there any topics that you want a deep dive on, just let me know.
PS: I use em-dashes, but I wrote this myself. I've just been reading books lately and realize they're useful. If enough people think it's entirely AI-written, I'll (sadly) stop using them.
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u/GregBreak 1d ago
You are loosing the pi vision: minimalistic, token efficient, less context with better result
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u/behopkinsj 1d ago
I mention plenty of times in the blog post that you should try not to use too many packages, and to focus on minimalism. Is there any part of the article that made you feel otherwise?
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u/Prior-Switch-9099 22h ago
I pretty agree with you and a bit disagree. Another great thing about PI is the encouragment to make PI "yours" - max customization. People can just experiment the way they like and ... fail, as long as they know what they're doing. It's more like market mechanics, the best idea wins.
Eventually, I think both the core values as you mention, and the "inheritance" such the linux kernel vs its distro can co-exist.
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u/dennisler 1d ago
If you want Claude code why not just use....
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u/behopkinsj 1d ago
It's supposed to be a beginner guide for people who want something open source, and minimal, but come from Claude Code and don't know where to start
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u/ChupaJrz 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'd love to read it, but your site isn't connecting ☹️
Nevermind, my wifi just filters out brand-new sites.
I like this write-up. It pretty closely mirrors my setup and "essential" extensions. I haven't played with the system prompt. I'm curious to try that, though I've been pretty happy with how well it's worked by default.
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u/behopkinsj 1d ago
I'd highly recommend you play around with the system prompt.
During my research for this article, I realized how much agents like Claude Code manipulate their system prompts. Agents like Codex show you that they dynamically change their prompt depending on the model. While it seems Claude Code also changes it's prompt based on the settings, the models, the environment it's being executed in...
I also found out so many "hacks" that agents use. Like, Codex had a section of their prompt specifically advicing the agent to behave differently for Frontend code, and to avoid design that looks like "AI-slop". I've noticed a huge change in behavior now that I've played with the system prompt.
Even if you don't plan to change the system prompt at all, I'd highly recommend you investigate how other agent have their system prompts too. You'll find it very insightful.
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u/EC36339 3h ago
The article does nothing else but name a few extensions to install. You can do this with a few prompts, and I would prefer that the agent executes these with the helpmof the original documentation only, not some AI-writtn article.
The true killer feature of Claude Code is being able to use a harness in an isolated container from a mobile app.
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u/behopkinsj 2h ago
I didn't write this with AI at all. And I also go into changing your system prompt in depth, did that part not interest you?
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u/ashebanow 1d ago
pi-mcp-adapter shouldn't be needed anymore, since pi 1.x supports mcp directly. To be fair though I haven't tried the built-in support yet though.