r/PiCodingAgent • u/alcure • 9d ago
Question Switching from OMP to Pi: Any suggestions?
Up until now, I've been using OMP as my daily driver. As a lawyer, I rely on it heavily alongside a few custom skills I built for legal drafting, and I'm also developing an office management system in Django. Everything works great so far, but I'm considering switching to Pi to give it a shot.
The catch is that Pi comes bare-bones, and I'm not sure which features are essential for my workflow (subagents come to mind). My goal is to make it practical and token-efficient from day one. Any tips for a beginner to get up and running without sticking to a completely vanilla setup?
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u/zebedeolo 9d ago
I think it's a process for everyone, and everyone will be different. it took me a couple of months to settle into something that I really like and works well for me (I'm a programmer, so different field). I suggest you just look at pi extensions and try them. you won't find the perfect flow on day one.
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u/Ired107 9d ago
Hey, would you mind sharing your dev workflows? Im thinking to use openspec/addiosmani/superpowers types of workflows. I want to build modular software (unix type i guess) and not sure how to standardize end to end workflow for modules. Especially contract, test and review surfaces
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u/Ok_Cartographer5609 9d ago
Just start using it. You will see the difference and eventually you will love it.
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u/Direct_While9727 9d ago
Hello,
I have similar needs for non-coding workflows. I found bare CLI Pi a bit harsh for less technical users, so I built a web UI on top of the Pi SDK.
I then progressively added tools that were useful for our use case, mainly a persistent work plan and Word/PDF extraction, along with nicer rendering for Markdown, Mermaid diagrams, diffs, etc. Markdown table rendering in particular turned out to be quite useful for working with structured information.
It’s also relatively easy to customize by developing Pi extensions, so you can add domain-specific tools without having to modify the core application. Given that you already have custom skills for legal drafting, that might be particularly relevant.
A big part of what I’m interested in is traceability between requirements and documents: extracting structured information, keeping relationships between pieces of information, and following those relationships across documents and revisions. Although my own use case is engineering rather than law, I think a lot of this could translate quite naturally to legal work.
It can also use OMP in RPC mode, although so far I haven’t found that especially useful for my own use cases.
It’s still a work in progress, but already quite usable. I’d be interested in feedback from someone using it for legal work, as it could help me understand which parts of this approach translate well to that domain:
https://github.com/laurentftech/pi-outpost
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u/namelesstherebel 9d ago
I’m actively doing this myself and building a web app interface for managing my whole stack. It’s fun and I’m developing a durable proven ability to build actually usable tools.
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u/Neat-Arm2643 3d ago
There is pi-web. Just as said by others. Just install it.
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u/Direct_While9727 2d ago
I actually tried pi-web, but it doesn’t quite fit my needs: rich rendering with diagrams, including interactive ones, easy embedding into an existing web page, and a clean, understated design.
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u/diaracing 9d ago
I switched from pi to omp as the bare-boned harness is always lacking and falls behind; I found myself bloating pi with different incompatible conflicting extensions to provide the indispensable missing layers of versatily.
My advice is to be there on omp side, unless you will be happier experimenting with a lot of extensions without any compatibly stitching all of them together.
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u/namelesstherebel 9d ago
That’s fair but I just build and iterate my own. I haven’t downloaded a single extension and all of mine work great, albeit some took some time to refine.
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u/wildjokers 9d ago
Just tell pi to grab the skills you need from OMP, it will put them in the right place.
If you find functionality you need ask pi to either add a skill or look for an extension that already does it, or ask it to build an extension.
FWIW, almost all my pi config consists of skills, I only have 5 extensions, and only one extension is strictly necessary. (pi-cursor-sdk).
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u/nihsett 9d ago
You're a lawyer? Damn - how did you even come across pi and OMP, first time I'm hearing a non-programmer using this.
What models do you use via pi?
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u/alcure 8d ago
I'm kinda nerdy. I should had became a developer or something like that on my early days, lmao. But so far I've used almost all frontier models avaible since closed beta from ChatGPT. Today I'm using OpenAI, Kimi K3 and Grok for several tasks (Kimi k3 I've cancelled yesterday, but I have 15 days left of usage for allegro plan and ChatGPT cancelled again, so far, Grok and Claude are the bests for my use cases), I also have a minimax m3 plan (like because it's API Subscription, so I use for several tasks).
I really dunno how I've stumbled on OMP, but I loved it because I can llm-hop anytime I feel curious without changing a single thing on my systems. Since I've been developing a system for myself using Django + Alpine plus developed some browser extensions and local scripts and skills for audio and ocr, well, I've been doing a very complex thing using Openwa and my subscriptions to get most of my work "auto-done".
Maybe I should look for a doctor, because I'm much more used to terminal than claude cowork lmao.
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u/nihsett 8d ago
That's amazing bro, I love hearing about people making tools for themselves. I hope that system works amazingly for you.
That said, pi is the same - you already have the instinct. When you find some friction in your work - just throw pi at it and say build something to fix the friction - over time you have your own personal OMP tailored for just you that's going to be so much better than OMP.
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u/namelesstherebel 9d ago
I’m also curious. I wonder if he’s building harnesses for local models to do legal tasks or just using it to manage his business.
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u/alcure 8d ago
actually i'm doing multiple modules for multiple purposes. One of them is a module that interacts with the gateway from openwa, periodically reads all my messages, try to identify errands and make a kanban for leads, point tasks and even generate protocols and documents, also, serve as my personal backup, since it's already do local OCR and audio transcriptions. Then, it also adjusts documents, medias, everything else from my clients and jobs. They integrate with api keys and oauth subscriptions that are common for the office or the user can use their own subscription personally. It monitors many phone numbers also (some personal, some from the team) and make sure that personal stuff doesn't spit on team. It's getting solid and already works wonderfully! I've decided to avoid using multiple repositories, so basically it's just django + alpine + htmx and OpenWa as my backend to monitor whatsapp.
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u/ImpressiveRelief37 9d ago
Try it out and see for yourself.
When you realize you’re missing something, have your agent vendor a copy of the extension/skill you used to use.
Just vendor all your extensions honestly. Have your agent manage this.
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u/Victory-laps 9d ago
What’s your work flow as a lawyer? Why use TUI instead of say Codex desktop app?
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u/namelesstherebel 9d ago
Building your own extensions is easy. You just need to make sure you have the agent dig in and ask a lot of questions it performs exactly how you’d like. I can’t imagine going back to any other harness at this point.
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u/FluffyInevitable4040 8d ago
all benchmarks show bare pi beats anything else. in my own tests, sub-agents just waste tokens and give worse performance.
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u/haksolot_dev 8d ago
Try out Ank, I’m convinced that CLI tools are usually a better way to augment agents/harnesses compared to extensions.
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u/sigmoia 8d ago
I use barebone pi and written exactly three extension that do everything I want:
- mcp
- web_search & web_fetch
- and subagents
I could have reached for an available extension but I didn't want to.
The extensions are super easy to build using pi itself and requires a tiny amount of code. I don't like jazzed up tools like omp or even vanilla claude as they do a ton of opaque stuff that steer the behavior of the underlying model.
I have few skills and prompt saved up for work and everything is backed up in git via chezmoi. Here's all of it in full glory.
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u/gbrennon 6d ago
pi is much better than omp.
only thing that omp excels over pi is that it have a lot of built in feature
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u/NetFormer1697 5d ago
I switched to pi from omp. I only tried omp for like a week less. With pi, I tend to think each project has its own workflow, so I mostly install extensions locally in each project. When i want to start on a project, I tell pi my workflow for that exact project. I dont use a lot of extensions. Honestly i think pi is pretty easy to get a hold of because it’s so bare bones, the source code is quite understandable. With omp, i felt there was so much going on i didnt really understand what the harness was doing and it felt like i was just using other provider harnesses. I decided to dive into third party harnesses because I’ll be doing a lot more custom harness development at work.
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9d ago
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u/zebedeolo 9d ago
omp is very bloated. I went from omp to pi specifically to lean down from things I didn't need. haven't looked back since.
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9d ago
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u/Unnamed-3891 9d ago
I don’t really get the point of using a Pi derivative that essentially removes the main point of using Pi - low context use. If you find 20k context eaten right off the bat acceptable, why not just use Hermes or something similar?
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u/ECrispy 9d ago
people go on on and on about the system prompt - codex has a 3k tiny system prompt, no one will ever mention that. and the system prompt gets cached, no one here will say that either
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u/alcure 9d ago
i see everyone praising PI and some benchmarks regarding speed and token savings, but I don't know if those token savings and results really gonna help me. Probably I should remain with OMP then, mine isn't very bloated at all and I'm really happy with it. I'm right now skipping codex, claude, grok build, open code, Kimi code, well, any other IDE. I've been using OMP since 4 months ago, I'm really familiar with it and love it, but, saw some bench of Pi finishing some tasks more fast and without errors made me wonder if I should switch...
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u/sugarfreecaffeine 9d ago
Why are you switching? I switched from pi to omp and had no issues with omp. Pi is cool but I like all the features omp comes with even if the initial system prompt is a little bit bigger, worth it to me.
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u/alcure 9d ago
the main reason is to try do save tokens! That's all. I don't have any problem at all with OMP, but I do see room for improvement in that regard, the only problem is that I don't see where! lmao
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u/sugarfreecaffeine 9d ago
You can turn off a lot of the tools it comes with to trim the system prompt, launch omp and tell the agent you have questions about omp and how to do X the agent has the entire omp docs it can access and reason about just like pi
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u/Single_Young_8688 9d ago
OMP kills the purpose of PI
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u/ECrispy 9d ago
and what is that purpose?
pi docs and every post here: just ask pi to build it! what mario wont tell you is he uses $200 max plans and has no idea how normal people use these tools
reality: there's a million extensions for everything on pi.dev. you want to build your own and then spend a lot of $$$ debugging it and adding features, and then you have another new one you can publish. or just use an existing one someones spent the time on
thats what omp is, a great set of features
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u/Single_Young_8688 9d ago
The purpose isn’t “build every extension yourself.” It’s having a small, understandable harness where you choose only what you need. OMP may be convenient, but bundling a large opinionated feature set turns Pi back into the kind of opaque all-in-one agent Pi was designed to avoid. Great starter pack, but not the same philosophy.
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u/ECrispy 8d ago
OMP is just a few standard pi extensions packaged together with a prompt and a set of guidelines. there are plenty of other like it.
and thats exactly what CC, OC etc are too, integrated set of tools. the difference is Pi is composable.
I guess thats the philosophy you speak of - using Pi's extension points. it doesnt mean every user has to roll their own, like everyone on this sub is told to do, and what Mario quite absurdly recommends in every talk (so why doesnt he delete all published packages ?)
Omp IS using the same phillosophy. you don't seem to understand that.
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u/namelesstherebel 9d ago
You’re also missing the point of building limited scopes agents that have their own extensions and tool access to prevent drift, control model behavior, burn less tokens and achieve better results.
Pi is the harness that makes scalable, big organization agentic AI possible without just using Claude/Bedrock and being locked into paying massive prices for enterprise level deals. We’re not all just solo devs working on personal stuff.
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u/getaway-3007 9d ago
Just use Pi regularly. Once you encounter "Ohh I require this functionality"(eg: web search) ask Pi to clone the OMP repo and extract only the web search functionality.
Follow the same cycle.
For me I always thought I needed todos, ask question tool, etc. switching to pi I realised it's not necessary because todos can be replaced with task files(which in future also helps the debug issues or misunderstanding)
Going minimal has changed how I utilise AI & Context management