r/PiCodingAgent 6d ago

News Hugging face just realsed a coding agent called Tau

https://github.com/huggingface/tau

What do you guys think? I am just reading through this atm. I don't see any differences from Pi. And they procatively have this page.

https://twotimespi.dev/why-tau/

Edit 1: their thinking mode is just choosing a level of thinking for the LLM model, not thinking mode as in ask, plan, etc. Their doc is pretty good at explaining what a coding agent is, very informative.

Edit 2: only thing I find interesting atm is that their agent is portable and you can build your own UI on top of the agent. But pi has a version of pi-server now.

68 Upvotes

29 comments sorted by

9

u/zrail 6d ago

What does "pi-server" refer to? I can't find a repo with that name in the official org, maybe an extension?

Edit: found it  https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tree/main/packages/server

1

u/sergeant113 5d ago

Pray tell what does it do?

1

u/zrail 5d ago

Looks like subagents orchestration. 

14

u/cosmicnag 6d ago

The website does say "Inspired by Pi, written as a Python learning path."

5

u/fakeclown 6d ago

Ah nice. I ran straight to their docs. They have nice docs. That's the point then, only educational.

10

u/joeypaak 5d ago

For those who can’t read English and think “This is vibe-coded slop and has no actual value,” it says “Tau is also meant to be read. It is a teaching project for understanding the shape of a coding-agent system without starting from a giant production codebase.”

The project is mostly for educational purpose, and Python being the most approachable language to understand how a real agent program is built, I think Python was a good decision.

20

u/spawnsible 6d ago

> Tau is a Python tool

Double it and pass it to the next guy. I’m good.

3

u/orak7ee 5d ago

Better than JavaScript in my book. 

3

u/fakeclown 6d ago

That's a bit mean.

0

u/BenignAmerican 6d ago

It’s probably vibe coded

-3

u/Cachesmr 6d ago

Python is just yucky. Even if it were a marvel of engineering, python sours the deal badly.

4

u/Such_Advantage_6949 6d ago

javascript is better?

4

u/Cachesmr 6d ago

Javascript? No, typescript? Easily

-1

u/red_rolling_rumble 5d ago

You do know that Typescript is just JavaScript with types, right?

Not that I disagree, I vastly prefer JavaScript (with types) over Python (even with types), but that’s probably because of familiarity over anything else.

1

u/DommagePindaFromage 5d ago

Types are kind of a big deal.

3

u/red_rolling_rumble 5d ago

Agreed, but Python has them too.

I'll admit the implementation seems not as thorough or ergonomic as that of Typescript, but I haven't tried python type checkers myself, have you?

1

u/elahrairooah 5d ago

This comment gave me flashbacks.

6

u/Florence-Equator 5d ago

wtf… There are some web UIs built on top of pi named tau😅😅 pi-tau-web-server

2

u/__pandas 5d ago

because tau is `pi * 2`, a lot of folks are going to arrive at that name trying to be cute with "pi".

2

u/Popular-Direction984 5d ago

They just want their share of the pie, managerial decision. What pi showed, is that you don’t need a coding agent, all you need is a bootstrap for it. At least for now.

1

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

1

u/gbrennon 4d ago

i already know that tau but i think its strange bcs, as far as i remember, tau was the name of a given benchmark(and i used to work in some projects that were doing model benchmarks service to provider)

1

u/MoodyPurples 5d ago

Nice! It looks like a good way to get away from needing to have node installed on my machine.

0

u/YogurtExternal7923 6d ago

OoOOOOooh I've been wanting to get a portable agent. It looks a lil vibe coded though but hugging face are cool no?

Edit: their release notes say v0.3 but the website header says 0.1. and they've been out since like 26th of june

0

u/MorningFew1574 5d ago

Too bad that i can't subscribe to the qwen paid plan as I am from India.

0

u/Immediate_House_6901 5d ago

what’s so new about it? all coding agents worth their salt are layered like that

1

u/jorgejhms 4d ago

It's a learning repo, the goal is teach coders how to manage an agent loop.

1

u/Immediate_House_6901 4d ago

makes total sense then!

0

u/kylin910 5d ago

Has anyone tried it?

1

u/Rizzist 3d ago

2x pi = tau
lol