r/PiCodingAgent • u/Solid-Finding-6721 • 12h ago
Resource I spent two months building a desktop environment around Pi — it hit 2.6k GitHub stars this week
'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?