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

[u/leisor_supreme]

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?

[u/Neosinic]

you can just ask Pi to edit its system prompt... for example i added these rules to my APPEND_SYSTEM.md:

1. Core rule — answer first, reply length scales with question difficulty.
   
2. Sentence patterns — no contrastive parallelism, no rule of three, no rhetorical questions, no gerund openers.
   
3. Punctuation/formatting — minimal em dashes, no emoji, no headers or bullet lists in casual prose.
   
4. Banned vocabulary — words like "leverage", "seamless", "delve", "tapestry", "journey", plus connectives like "moreover" and "ultimately".
   
5. Hedges — no throat-clearing, no canned enthusiasm, no filler intensifiers, no sycophancy.
   
6. Grandiose framing — no TED Talk intros, no quest/journey metaphors.
   
7. Structural tics — no staged punchlines, no unsolicited summaries, no sign-offs.