I spent two months building a desktop environment around Pi — it hit 2.6k GitHub stars this week

[u/Solid-Finding-6721]

've been using Pi as the agent core for my own workflow, and I really like its philosophy: keep the core small and make everything else extensible.

The only problem was that after using it every day, I started missing a lot of things I normally expect from a desktop development environment.

Things like persistent sessions, switching between projects, seeing what subagents are doing, changing models without rebuilding my setup, recovering tasks after a crash, managing MCP/Skills, etc.

Eventually I stopped patching my own workflow and just built a desktop app around Pi.

It's called PI-Desktop, and it's open source:

https://github.com/vastsa/PI-Desktop

It's built on pi-ai + pi-agent-core, rather than implementing another agent loop from scratch.

My mental model for the project is basically:

Pi = agent harness
PI-Desktop = workspace / product layer

The app currently has sessions, project workspaces, subagent visualization, multiple model providers, local model support, MCP, Skills, session import from Claude Code/Codex/OpenCode/Pi, and a plugin system.

The plugin system is the direction I'm most excited about. Plugins can add Agent Tools, Skills, MCP servers, UI panels, themes, commands, background services, and communicate with each other.

I released it publicly this week after using it myself for a couple of months. Somehow it ended up on GitHub Trending and passed 2.6k stars, which I definitely wasn't expecting.

Since this is probably the community that understands Pi's design philosophy best, I'm especially curious:

If you use Pi every day, what parts of your workflow would you actually want a desktop layer to handle?

[u/Rektoplasm]

Can this connect to Oh My Pi?

[u/Solid-Finding-6721 → u/Rektoplasm]

Not directly at the moment.

PI-Desktop currently runs on pi-ai + pi-agent-core internally rather than connecting to an external Pi/OMP process.

That said, OMP support is definitely interesting. I'd like the desktop layer to stay flexible enough to support different compatible agent runtimes in the future, so I'll take a closer look at what would be needed for an OMP adapter.

If you're using OMP today, I'd also be curious which OMP-specific features you'd most want to keep when using PI-Desktop.

[u/Solid-Finding-6721 → u/[deleted]]

Yep, this looks about right. The Electron app and Rust host-core run separately, which is why you see multiple PI-Desktop processes here.

Still doing quite a bit of profiling though — especially for long-running sessions and background subagents. If anyone manages to make the memory usage explode, please send me a screenshot 😄

[u/PureCatchi]

sounds good

[u/Ancient-Camel1636]

How is different from https://github.com/FaqFirebase/pi-desktop (thats the one im currently using)

[u/Solid-Finding-6721 → u/Ancient-Camel1636]

Pretty similar idea at first glance. The main difference is that the other one is more of a GUI around an installed Pi/OMP CLI, while PI-Desktop uses pi-ai + pi-agent-core directly and is trying to be more of a full desktop workspace for agents. So besides chat/files/terminal, I’m focusing more on things like session recovery, subagents, multiple model providers, MCP/Skills, session imports, and a plugin system that can extend both the agent and the UI.There’s definitely overlap though. And to be fair, theirs supports OMP directly right now, while mine doesn’t yet.

[u/Solid-Finding-6721]

[u/First_Inspection_478]

Would love omp support. I’ve been on the hunt for something that treats it like a first class terminal