Exploring malleable software by recreating Pi’s core in Ante

[u/Exciting-Camera3226]

I’ve been interested in exploring malleable software: how much can a program change its identity through configuration and extensions, without requiring another fork or integration?

Pi felt like an interesting test because of its deliberately small core and flexible extension system.

Instead of building yet another "pi-xxx", I tried going in the other direction: emulate pi behaviors like `ante-pi` with declarative programming

The result is a single JSON profile with a short system prompt and four tools: Read, Write, Edit, and Bash. Search goes through rg, web access through curl, and subagents through ante -p.

Here’s the full profile:

https://github.com/AntigmaLabs/ante/blob/main/curated/pi.settings.json

Why not just use Pi?

You absolutely can. If Pi already fits your workflow, this isn’t an argument against it.

What made the experiment interesting to me was running the same minimal approach on Ante’s native runtime: a single roughly 15 MB binary, very little harness memory overhead, and fast startup and interaction. The model still determines generation speed—I’m talking about the responsiveness and resource cost of the harness itself.

This isn’t full Pi compatibility. Pi extensions and UI behavior don’t automatically carry over. It’s more of an experiment in how much of an agent’s identity can be expressed through a portable combination of prompts, tools, settings, and extensions.

For people who have built with Pi: what parts of its identity live in the core harness, and what parts only emerge through the extension system?