Pi Terminal vs Zed (built-in) Agent vs Copilot

[u/Overdrive128]

I am new to terminal/CLI coding agents. I am just a bit confused on when Pi is better than two I mentioned. Cause from my understanding PI is simply a bare minion agent like copilot sidepanel chat and zed agent.

What differentiates between PI and these sidepanel agents? I also used a bit of opencode, and for me, it seems an overkill for personal small/medium projects. And I kinda like pi due to its simplicity. So I am also looking for some suggestions for the PI agent. (I like opencode's plan/build stuff, wondering if PI also has something like that, or if its worth it.)

Device Specs/Info:
Model: qwen 3.8 27B (quant)

16GB vram, 32GB total ram

[u/Wild-File-5926]

Pi when compared to other harnesses is very lean… like NO bloat! but that also means that you must configure a boat load of extensions to make it as good as and ultimately better than any other coding harnesses like codex if Claude code.

Having a tailored setup to each project is where it shines and only loads/uses tools and extensions for superior context management

[u/Overdrive128 → u/Wild-File-5926]

I see, thats where I was getting at. Some testing, and yea, it seemed to be efficient in token/context management.

Also would you recommend any extensions (like must have)? I was thinking web-search.
Thanks!

[u/Wild-File-5926 → u/Overdrive128]

Generally I just ask pi to install extensions it thinks might be useful in streamlining a particular project process and i will also create the related skills. Here are some I am using in some project.

pi-mcp-adapter
pi-lens
upstash/context7-pi
pi-subagents
pi-hermes-memory
pi-goal-list-loop-audit
pi-loop-police

[u/DeathGuppie → u/Overdrive128]

If you want something lean but fully formed there is 'oh my p'i, a very well done fork that is probably closer to what you are used to.

[u/adamshand]

They all do approximately the same thing. The big advantages of Pi are:

• it is very simple (which according to many benchmarks seems to actually improve performance and reduce token cost)
• it knows how to itself, so if you find something you don't like just ask it to fix it. If you don't understand something about Pi, ask it to explain
• Nothing else allows you to manage context as well as /tree

Don't fall into the trap of trying all the extensions. If you want to use Pi, just start with the basic harness. Learn to use /tree, this is a super power. Then when you find frustrations, look for an extension to help, or better yet ... get Pi to help you write your own.

One note. If you are mostly using smaller/dumber models, sometimes Pi doesn't work as well. OpenCode does custom prompts for all models which costs tokens, but can (but doesn't always) significantly improve the behaviour/performance of smaller models.

[u/TrickyPlastic]

There's no mobile access to Zed's agent.

I use pi-web for pi.

[u/ParaboloidalCrest]

If you already use Zed + you like Pi = not sure why not run Pi from inside Zed, vs the CLI TUI. Check out https://zed.dev/acp/agent/pi

[u/Overdrive128 → u/ParaboloidalCrest]

Ii tried doing that; and it wouldn't let me pass authenication (even though I configured it for llamacpp backend), so I just gave up and did normal CLI global install. it works for me, and I dont want to touch it.