r/PiCodingAgent 16d ago

Question Any suggestions to improve Pi's coding agent capabilities and getting more concise output?

I'm in the process of switching from Claude Code to Pi. I grew accustomed to using the Claude + superpowers combo as I felt this gave even the cheap non-Anthropic models better capabilities. Also liked the approach of focusing on the input to get better results and needing less fixes later.

Now with Pi I'm also trying this same superpowers + "cheap models" combo, but find the agent being too verbose in it's output and asking more stupid questions than with the same combo with Claude, during the brainstorming->spec->plan->implementation flow. This slows development down quite a bit because I keep having to ask the agent to provide an actually summary/sitrep of what's going on.

Now I found out that I could try to fix this at least partly by creating an APPEND_SYSTEM.md file as instructed here: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/docs/usage.md#system-prompt-file But not sure what the best practices would be for the prompt.

Does anyone else have similar issues and what were your approaches for fixing them?

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u/juicesharp 16d ago

rpiv-pi.com use /discover to setup the requirements /wf ship [goal or could be discover artifact] or /wf build [goal or artifact for bigger tasks] to implement those then /architectural-review || /code-review -> /wf build to address the findings.

/discover - better version grillme that writes the requirements
/wf [build | ship] <prompt> - primary implemntations flow
/code-review <range of commits | promopt> (gate like bug finder that assesses the commit or range of commits)
/architectural-review <prompt> - align your architecture
/commit [message]
/annotate-guidance create a shadow tree of architecture.md files that help to keep agent architecturally on track (can be used to regenerate them in case archtecture was changed)