pi is great and made popular some things that are really valuable, that hopefully spread to more projects (arbitrary forking with /tree, system prompt transparency and control). i was hoping to use it on a few projects but needed something to embed, and it didn't quite fit the bill. ended up building https://github.com/zackham/aloop which i am using in coordination with https://stepwise.run/ - reach if you're interested, both under active dev and deployed in systems doing real work.
Pi is a coding agent harness, like Claude Code, but significantly better and more elegant. Here is a good post describing it: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/
I switched a few months ago and have not looked back. Unfortunately Anthropic blocked access from Claude Subscription users today, but that's a different story.
I switched about a month ago, looked back once for about 10 minutes and decided I'm officially done w CC. I didn't realize what a dull knife CC is until I tried a really sharp one, and that's Pi.
Pi doesn't claim to get better results. It is conceptually simpler, smaller, and more transparent to the end user than most harnesses. It's as much about the things it doesn't do as about what it can do.
I don't know much about the factors that determine why one AI coding harness is better than others. Is it system prompts? Or just personal preference in terms of the UX and there isn't actually a better output between using CC or Pi?
So what makes Pi better than CC? Is it better than OpenCode?
I think it has something to do with a core library that is or was used in one of the other AI-related tools that got some buzz recently.
I'm not sure if this library or if the AI tool itself really matter all that much, but a lot of people seem to think that they do, or will anyways, which is probably why this post has no context. Because the author assumes that both the library and the tool are well known, but I think they're only well known by those in the AI world.
You know how it is. You only know what you know, and it's hard to remember what it was like when you didn't know. When you're around people who talk about the same things all the time, it's easy to just assume that's what's everyone's talking about.
There are so many of these little tools coming and going these days it's hard to keep track. Some of them might end up mattering, but most of them probably won't.
Taken verbatim "Maybe you've heard about the little app called OpenClaw. OpenClaw is powered by pi. That made me collateral of Peter's success. Especially after Armin thought it's a good idea to tell the whole world about the relationship between OpenClaw and pi on his blog."
Mario Zechner wrote Pi, an agent framework, and wrote Pi (yes the names are confusing), a coding harness (like Claude Code) on top of it. OpenClaw uses Pi the framework, so now Mario Zechner is joining Armin Ronacher's company.
There are some people that are "way too deep" into what they think is the "AI ecosystem". The reality is that no such thing exists and most people opening Claude daily have never heard of their harness, tool, stack or whatever. It has about half the relevancy of "MCP", which is such a similar concept where hanger ons try to catch a steam train.
Claude Code is a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat.
Pi has been elegantly designed with a minimalist mindset.
> It has about half the relevancy of "MCP", which is such a similar concept where hanger ons try to catch a steam train.
I'm not even sure what you're saying here. Are you saying MCP and Pi are similar concepts? Or that both are hanger-ons? I believe the steam train of Claude Code is heading for a wall and Pi has no intention to catch it.
> Claude Code is a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat.
Not disagreeing but I'm curious how much it really matters.
I use OpenCode which is similarly a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat and get pretty good results!
I'm open to switching to pi, which I've read about occasionally on HN, but I'm struggling to see where it might have practical benefits versus OpenCode.
The idea that pi is now under corporate governance with a potentially sustainable business model does intrigue me, but there's risk in adopting "open core" software too due to the potential rug pull and incentives to gate important features behind more restrictive licenses.
> In May, the three of us ended up at Peter's flat in Vienna and built our first vibe slopped project together: VibeTunnel.
May be overthinking this but I'm geniunely curious how that was done practically speaking? Standard git branch and merge or everyone sitting around deciding what prompt to write?
You know, there aren’t many people whose communication style, approach, and contribution history earn my confidence so completely. I can probably count on two hands the people I hold in that regard in this industry. Mario and Armin are two of them. It’s incredibly hard to build trust online these days, but there’s something about this Viennese crew that I like.
This was a solid letter to the fans. I get why it’s disappointing to some, but it sounds like it was the right move for them personally. For people who’ve earned that kind of credibility, I say congrats on the move.
Context: Mario Zechner is the creator of the pi coding harness which powers OpenClaw. OpenClaw is made by Peter Steinberger, a friend of Mario Zechner. Armin is another friend who made public that OpenClaw is based on pi.
Pi itself is a minimalist coding harness with a tiny 1500 token system message and only read, edit and bash as tools. I only discovered it a few weeks ago and it is surprisingly powerful with a local Qwen3.5-35B - especially as it allows to keep the context low.
Mario's blog posts are not easily digestible (imho) until you have read a few of them but they have plenty of profound thinking. His blog is for me the first one in years where I have spent an hour to read several posts.
Mario is deeply rooted in the OSS system and basically that is what he is talking about here in this post. That said, I have no idea what earendil is doing, except that it is based on pi.
Edit: My personal take - "I've sold out" is very much Austrian style because actually it is the opposite. To quote one thing from the post:
"Then Miguel and Nat approached us. Long story short: we sold RoboVM to Xamarin. A short while later Xamarin closed-sourced our open-source RoboVM core, quickly followed by Xamarin selling to Microsoft. Then Microsoft shut down RoboVM immediately.
While there was some monetary gain, everything about this fucking sucked."
So Mario did a lot of vetting to hopefully avoid this from happening again.
> Lefos uses a credit-based billing system. New accounts receive a limited number of starter credits at no cost. Usage of AI features consumes credits.
> When your credits run out, you can subscribe to a paid plan to receive additional credits each billing cycle. Subscriptions are processed through Polar, our billing provider. You can manage or cancel your subscription at any time from your account settings.
Understandable, I'd probably do the same in his position. Still sucks, we've seen this pattern a thousands times before and what happens next is pretty obvious.
I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.
I suggest you make yourself a private fork of Pi so that you don't have to be beholden to Mario and his not-so-new clique.
Create a private repo in GitHub first, then do a bare Git clone of https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono.git (ideally do it before the original repo gets moved to Earendil's GitHub org).
How long you want to continue pulling from "upstream" depends on your comfort level. At the very least, aim for v0.65.2, which is the last tagged release before today's announcement (commit hash 573eb91). Personally, I would continue to pull right up until the next tagged release.
With that little how-to guide out of the way, here's what I think:
Mario is free to do whatever and not give a shit about what the internet at large thinks of him. By that metric, he's doing a hell of a job with that rambling blog post. Likewise, I'm also free to mostly concur with the internet at large (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688794) and prepare simple mitigations like above that can blunt this to a certain degree. Let's just hope that Mario and Armin don't take the "flicker company" approach (his derogatory term for Anthropic) and DMCA the shit out of any private repos.
Like he iterates in the blog post multiple times: It's still MIT licensed, you can fork it to your heart's content. Or keep using the mainline and merge new features to your own fork.
> I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.
For what it's worth, it's pretty straightforward to recreate it I found, at least it's base idea. Readline w/ nice output is a bit of a pain, but still, doable, and if you don't care about that part of it, then the overall agent loop that you'd build on top of? You could build it, I promise.
Mario having to write this many words to justify this decision alone is a red flag already. The fact I can't understand what Earendil is after reading this many words is an even bigger red flag.
But who am I to judge? If I made a project as popular as pi I'd sell out so fast.
There is variation in how comfortable someone is with the idea of "selling out". It seems to me that Mario is less comfortable than many other people in the AI space. How comfortable someone is with the idea of selling out doesn't really seem like a good signal for how bad something is.
If Mario had instead just written: "I'm excited to work on the future of PI at Palantir." and nothing else, clearly this is worse?
> The fact I can't understand what Earendil is
From the article:
> I learned a few things. My European brain thinks pi is just another small, mildly useful OSS project of mine with no commercial value. My peers in the space seem to think it has properties that make it stand out over the alternatives. VCs and big corps seem to think that pi has commercial value. Some demonstrated their conviction by sending term sheets or "dream job" offers.
Mario thinks there's no commercial value, but clearly some VC people do. If you have the VC money, but don't have any ideas for how to justify commercial viability, why bother? If someone just handed me a big bag of cash and told you to just "do something", I could imagine coming up with Earndil. Make a nice landing page, write some nice guiding principles, and figure out the AI stuff later.
> The fact I can't understand what Earendil is after reading this many words is an even bigger red flag.
Same, but I heard about Armin Ronacher, and the things I heard were not exactly terrible. He's the creator of the Flask microframework, he's contributed to open source more than most people. Perhaps it'll be fine!
And, as Mario has written about ten times in his post: Pi is MIT licensed and it's not hard to find the "fork" button on GitHub.
> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are basically well-meaning hippies in my book
At least its this and not a book i actually care about. I shudder to think of a world where all the tech companies are called like 'Ghola', 'Giedi Prime', 'Heighliner', 'Harkonnen' etc
My experience with pi coding agent was having a session, exiting and then waiting 1min for the session to resume. I don't know why people praise this tool, as someone used to claude code, I never experienced this kind of poor performance beforehand.
I think it's a bit sad that we often say people "Sold out". Sometimes, I agree, but often, I point out that until the lady at the grocery store stops asking me for money when I walk up to check out, I need to pay my bills to eat.
I contribute to open source projects, but none of them to date could support me buying much more than a beer. If one took off such that I could "live" off it, I would be happy to leave my current job and dive all in. Until then, I just keep plodding along.
Been following Mario and Armin (much longer), and this is a good move for all parties involved. Would have been bad if Pi went the same direction as RoboVM (mentioned in the post). Earendil, as a company, is not clear for me yet but one of the projects Armin is working on that's part of this is Absurd[0], which is also an interesting project. Absurd, like Pi, is minimal and let's you have full control.
Tolkien stole the name from an Anglo Saxon poem, with a somewhat unclear meaning. His version of the story is woven through lots of his work, from the very earliest days. You could view all of Middle-earth as elaborating on his attempt to assign a meaning to it.
Piloting OSS is all the work of any other business and more. It is a more challenging path and all your decisions are out in the open for scrutiny. He made a decision to put his family first, and I respect that. It seems like there is an alternative to selling out, trusting the project to other people committed to OSS. The beauty of OSS is that this path is still available for people.
I found out last night via pi.dev. And the new repo of pi didn’t exist yet.
I have been working with pi-mono locally for a few months now. Great code base to study. Much higher quality than CC. (I have posted a gist analysis before.)
Will keep an eye on the work of these talented engineers and entrepreneurs. Good luck guys!
Eventually, everyone has a "price" or a "figure" they are thinking about in their heads. That's fine and I don't think Mario made any promises here about Pi.
However, the worst ones are the ones who preach to others about never selling out whilst telling others that they are there for the long-term publicly, but will privately sell out the minute the offer is greater and exclusive to them.
The point here is not make such promises. People who preach one thing and then are tested to do another are the ones to avoid.
> The one thing that differentiated Armin from other internet trolls was the way he conducted himself in these heated discussions. He was never emotional or aggressive. Our discussions would either end in cordial disagreement, or a newfound common understanding. That's extremely rare on the internet.
Ah haha so armin is also an Internet troll, right? For example if I said, one thing that sets the "Concorde apart from other commercial airliners, ..." I am saying the Concorde is a commercial airliner.
tbh. it sounds a bit like he himself was somewhat of an internet troll during that time
and it might not be quite the same definition of "internet troll" I tend to us
like it sounds a lot like a definition of "toll" like
- "very vocal, convicted of their opinion, non stop discussing(/neutral) potentially for the sake of discussing(/neutral)"
while I tend to associate more something like
- "intentional annoying, non stop discussing for the sake of annoying people, often using dishonest discussion techniques, potentially outright harassment"
> I think Armin and I first met 14 years ago, on the r/austria subreddit. We did not align politically on many things, him being a "hyper neoliberal" and me being a "social democrat" (at least according to what I feel was our mutual impression of each other). Any time I saw that @mitsuhiko handle in a thread, I felt the urge to tell someone they are wrong on the internet.
> Over coffee, Armin and I found we had more in common than we thought. Not only politically, but also in the way we think about software, and OSS specifically. In my recollection, we became actual friends that day, even if we didn't meet again for many years in real life.
This is probably the "highest value" part of that whole blog post, as this is something I see so frequently in the real world. People don't give others a chance to just be humans with conflicting views and opinions, and instead try to assign a label to the other part as quickly as possible, then they apply the same "rules of engagement" with that person, as anyone else who deserved to get that label. But once you forgo it, you realize how much you have in common even with your "worst enemies".
It goes both ways too, and the more closed up you are in that regard, others will treat you the same. But you miss out on so many interesting thoughts, ideas and conversations, when you limit yourself to labels and not realizing how diverse and interesting even the most "boring person" could be, given the right questions and the right conversation underlay.
they but "minimal dump DRM" into their client (supposedly, from people which leaked the linked source code, no me)
easy to circumvent
but would fall under "circumventing security protections"/"hacking their API"/etc. And due to the sometimes very unreasonable laws the US has in that area they can use that to go after anyone providing a workaround.
Through that maybe won't work well for the EU, I'm not sure how much the laws have been undermined in recent years but we had laws which made it explicitly legal to circumvent DRM iff it's for the sake of producing compatibility (with some caveats).
I think the law just says that it's legal to circumvent DRM for compatibility - they don't define DRM or compatibility. It's one of those vague laws that you only know if it matters when it gets tested in court.
I think if you were going to send the same harness/prompt traffic as Claude Code, then you’d just use Claude Code. Alternatives generally are trying to do something different, thus are going to be easy to detect.
I know people hate LLM writing but at least it gets to the point and gives some background context. I have no idea what this guy is talking about. It's an article aimed at people who know him personally, it seems.
Happy for Mario, Pi is the best harness I've ever tried. But overall disappointed by this decision. "This time everything is different" until it's not.
I don't understand. Why the disappointment? Pi is still open source. Nothing is changing. Earendil's majority owners have a perfect track record when it comes to open source. Armin is a super star in the Python and Rust ecosystems.
Mario maintains the project pro bono, which is only possible because he had an exit a couple of years ago. I believe it is a lot of work making sure that the quality of the codebase doesn't detoriate with the onslaught of slop that is hitting open source projects right now.
Additionally, I have massive respect for Armin and I don't believe Earandil is your typical VC startup that wants to grow no matter what.
I’m not disappointed. It seems philosophically the teams are aligned and Pi as a project can continue and be supported. It’s a better outcome than most could expect.
I can just see you telling that to a slave in 1830. What? You don't like slavery? Don't you see that you have to expect the slave owners to act in accordance with the incentives god gave them and force you to gather cotton until your hands bleed? change it or cope dude. Or someone watching from the hills as the horde of Gengis Khan torches their city and puts everyone they've ever known to the sword - those mongols are activing in accordance with incentives! Change it or cope!
This is so disappointing. Finally we had a fantastic, fully OSS, non-profit harness. Very extensible, well-made, minimal, untainted. None of the baggage of OpenCode both in terms of codebase as well as its.. "passionate" leadership, to put it mildly.
> Earendil is a public benefit corporation
Ah, so like OpenAI then.
> But I've also learned what I do not want. I do not want to build my own company around pi. We have a four-year-old kid. I want to watch and help him grow up as best as I can. This is, first and foremost, what I want. Everything else is secondary to that. In the past 2 months, he cried a lot because "daddy isn't here". I never ever want to experience that again.
That's completely fair. And above it, you sketch exactly what you could've done instead to solve this:
> I mostly handed over the reins to a beautiful team of core contributors in 2016, who to this day keep the project well maintained. I never commercialized libGDX, unless you consider it commercialization to build a proprietary piece of software like Spine on top of it.
Sounds like the above worked great, and this would've been the obvious option to do once again.
> part of me wants to take this further. That includes building a team. It also includes commercialization to feed the team, done in a way that doesn't repeat the shit I lived through with RoboVM.
So this is the only part that really answers the "why" - you want to earn a living from working on Pi, and presumably (?) believe you can't achieve that with OSS. I think you're wrong, and belong to the 0.001% of OSS projects that can earn a very nice living from working on Pi without taking this step. I'm not exaggerating, I would fully agree that the number of OSS projects where this is possible is exceedingly small. But this is one of them. If you don't believe that then fair enough, I guess, though I'm curious why you believe that. Because there clearly exist a good number of OSS projects that make their lead developer a very comfortable living. Which condition do those projects satisfy that Pi doesn't?
If that's not it, then the article doesn't really answer the "why" despite lots of text that appears to do so.
You obviously owe me, or anyone really, nothing. So far all you've done is contribute for free. But if you're going to write this kind of article to clearly do a little bit of soul searching, assuaging fears and "make things public" to stop them weighing on your mind, then it looks better to go all the way and state things in plain terms.
> So this is the only part that really answers the "why" - you want to earn a living from working on Pi, and presumably (?) believe you can't achieve that with OSS. I think you're wrong, and belong to the 0.001% of OSS projects that can earn a very nice living from working on Pi without taking this step. I'm not exaggerating, I would fully agree that the number of OSS projects where this is possible is exceedingly small. But this is one of them. If you don't believe that then fair enough, I guess, though I'm curious why you believe that. Because there clearly exist a good number of OSS projects that make their lead developer a very comfortable living. Which condition do those projects satisfy that Pi doesn't?
Because he wants to have tons of money in the bank and get up every day to go do anything he wants with his four-year-old kid when he wakes up. Building something in a couple months that got popular enough to be able to this is amazing. Not check GitHub issues and PRs from ClawdBot5000 and hope he'll make some money from it in 5 years.
We're entering a new world of software development that allows people with no coding experience to do things like build their own mobile apps, websites, and all sorts of other things that were previously reserved for only technical people. The gap is closing quickly. At this point, if you're a "real" developer and have an app that somebody wants to purchase, you'd be crazy not to take the offer if it's a good amount and have cash in the bank that would allow you to do your own stuff in the future without worrying about $dayjob.
> You cannot imagine what people called me on social media and via email, despite me having zero control over the situation
Well, perhaps they were right. Naturally when it comes to open source, people don't have any control over what others do with their own time. If they do not contribute financially (or their own time into improvement a project) then even less so. Still, it is a decision that has been made because of prioritising one's own personal goals. This is fine; but to expect that others share the same 1:1 opinion is not logical.
> Like me, he thinks open-source and open protocols are a necessity, not just lipstick on a corporate pig.
I think the description is also painting lipstick on a pig. I've seen too many who promote open source but then sell out suddenly. Github? And what is the influence Shopify is doing in the ruby ecosystem? But anyway, that is all their own personal thing. To assume any community needs to share those personal success stories ... it makes no sense.
> Earendil's products are built on top of pi.
Ok, so ... that is lipstick. Aka promo. I don't understand why he critisizes others but then does the same himself. Which is fine; I just don't get the assessment he is doing.
> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies.
Here he refers to Palantir clearly. Thiel is abusing Tolkien IMO. Or he sees himself as Sauron or whatever. But he is more a clown Sauron, just like his mad orange king is.
> who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around.
Does AI serve humans? Or does it serve those who control it?
> Finally, and most importantly to me, almost everyone on the team has kids.
So what? I mean, many people who are not so well in the head, had kids. I am not saying that refers to the blog author here, mind you - I refer to the "my criterium is that all have kids". Pity on those fools who don't have kids then?
> pi is owned by Earendil, the company.
Ultimately people will derive value from it, or not; but it is clearly a private project. Even if open source, we can see that with chrome + Google. Google makes most decisions. Yes, you can build on top of it; I use thorium right now, for instance. But I am not fooled one second who effectively controls a project here.
Oh, catch yourself. Tell me you wouldn't do the same for your family.
I run a tiny thing that a lot of people like. Its licence is permissive: if I 'sold out', nobody who is using it today would have to change a damned thing.
And you know what? Call me if you wanna buy it. Because here's my priority list:
Lol, this is like the fourth time you've edited your comment which started as 1. Mine / 2. Yours. Take it easy, the crowd isn't going to come down hard on you.
There's nothing wrong with making money, I'm 100% all-in on capitalism.
It's just the sudden change in attitude, particularly when people jump to the polar opposite they've preached their whole lives. Some say it's wise to change your mind, I just find it repulsive.
pi is great and made popular some things that are really valuable, that hopefully spread to more projects (arbitrary forking with /tree, system prompt transparency and control). i was hoping to use it on a few projects but needed something to embed, and it didn't quite fit the bill. ended up building https://github.com/zackham/aloop which i am using in coordination with https://stepwise.run/ - reach if you're interested, both under active dev and deployed in systems doing real work.
I read most of the post, went to the linked project and still don't have an idea what this is about.
Pi is a coding agent harness, like Claude Code, but significantly better and more elegant. Here is a good post describing it: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/
I switched a few months ago and have not looked back. Unfortunately Anthropic blocked access from Claude Subscription users today, but that's a different story.
I switched about a month ago, looked back once for about 10 minutes and decided I'm officially done w CC. I didn't realize what a dull knife CC is until I tried a really sharp one, and that's Pi.
To what extent do you feel the harness contributes relative to the model?
To put another way, how much inferior can the model be with a superior harness to achieve a similar result?
Pi doesn't claim to get better results. It is conceptually simpler, smaller, and more transparent to the end user than most harnesses. It's as much about the things it doesn't do as about what it can do.
I don't know much about the factors that determine why one AI coding harness is better than others. Is it system prompts? Or just personal preference in terms of the UX and there isn't actually a better output between using CC or Pi?
So what makes Pi better than CC? Is it better than OpenCode?
CC is a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat. If that rocks your boat, go knock yourself out.
Is it better than OpenCode? It's certainly much smaller and doesn't have a client-server architecture - already that is a big win.
There's a recentish YouTube talk when he introduces the concept and contrasts against those.
My (oversimplified) summary: it's like vim versus an IDE. Good for tinkerers and obsessives who like small, sharp and customisable tools.
Which model are you using it with? I imagine it's bring your own model?
I think it has something to do with a core library that is or was used in one of the other AI-related tools that got some buzz recently.
I'm not sure if this library or if the AI tool itself really matter all that much, but a lot of people seem to think that they do, or will anyways, which is probably why this post has no context. Because the author assumes that both the library and the tool are well known, but I think they're only well known by those in the AI world.
You know how it is. You only know what you know, and it's hard to remember what it was like when you didn't know. When you're around people who talk about the same things all the time, it's easy to just assume that's what's everyone's talking about.
There are so many of these little tools coming and going these days it's hard to keep track. Some of them might end up mattering, but most of them probably won't.
Taken verbatim "Maybe you've heard about the little app called OpenClaw. OpenClaw is powered by pi. That made me collateral of Peter's success. Especially after Armin thought it's a good idea to tell the whole world about the relationship between OpenClaw and pi on his blog."
Mario Zechner wrote Pi, an agent framework, and wrote Pi (yes the names are confusing), a coding harness (like Claude Code) on top of it. OpenClaw uses Pi the framework, so now Mario Zechner is joining Armin Ronacher's company.
Indeed. Also what a very annoying website.
Looks like LLM-generated to me
There are some people that are "way too deep" into what they think is the "AI ecosystem". The reality is that no such thing exists and most people opening Claude daily have never heard of their harness, tool, stack or whatever. It has about half the relevancy of "MCP", which is such a similar concept where hanger ons try to catch a steam train.
Wow, I couldn't disagree more!
Claude Code is a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat.
Pi has been elegantly designed with a minimalist mindset.
> It has about half the relevancy of "MCP", which is such a similar concept where hanger ons try to catch a steam train.
I'm not even sure what you're saying here. Are you saying MCP and Pi are similar concepts? Or that both are hanger-ons? I believe the steam train of Claude Code is heading for a wall and Pi has no intention to catch it.
> Claude Code is a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat.
Not disagreeing but I'm curious how much it really matters.
I use OpenCode which is similarly a steaming pile of vibe-coded bloat and get pretty good results!
I'm open to switching to pi, which I've read about occasionally on HN, but I'm struggling to see where it might have practical benefits versus OpenCode.
The idea that pi is now under corporate governance with a potentially sustainable business model does intrigue me, but there's risk in adopting "open core" software too due to the potential rug pull and incentives to gate important features behind more restrictive licenses.
Slop.
> In May, the three of us ended up at Peter's flat in Vienna and built our first vibe slopped project together: VibeTunnel.
May be overthinking this but I'm geniunely curious how that was done practically speaking? Standard git branch and merge or everyone sitting around deciding what prompt to write?
You know, there aren’t many people whose communication style, approach, and contribution history earn my confidence so completely. I can probably count on two hands the people I hold in that regard in this industry. Mario and Armin are two of them. It’s incredibly hard to build trust online these days, but there’s something about this Viennese crew that I like.
This was a solid letter to the fans. I get why it’s disappointing to some, but it sounds like it was the right move for them personally. For people who’ve earned that kind of credibility, I say congrats on the move.
Context: Mario Zechner is the creator of the pi coding harness which powers OpenClaw. OpenClaw is made by Peter Steinberger, a friend of Mario Zechner. Armin is another friend who made public that OpenClaw is based on pi.
Pi itself is a minimalist coding harness with a tiny 1500 token system message and only read, edit and bash as tools. I only discovered it a few weeks ago and it is surprisingly powerful with a local Qwen3.5-35B - especially as it allows to keep the context low.
Mario's blog posts are not easily digestible (imho) until you have read a few of them but they have plenty of profound thinking. His blog is for me the first one in years where I have spent an hour to read several posts.
Mario is deeply rooted in the OSS system and basically that is what he is talking about here in this post. That said, I have no idea what earendil is doing, except that it is based on pi.
Edit: My personal take - "I've sold out" is very much Austrian style because actually it is the opposite. To quote one thing from the post:
"Then Miguel and Nat approached us. Long story short: we sold RoboVM to Xamarin. A short while later Xamarin closed-sourced our open-source RoboVM core, quickly followed by Xamarin selling to Microsoft. Then Microsoft shut down RoboVM immediately.
While there was some monetary gain, everything about this fucking sucked."
So Mario did a lot of vetting to hopefully avoid this from happening again.
> who made public that OpenClaw is based on pi.
I haven't kept up with the various claw stuff, but isn't openclaw the one under MIT on github? What does "made public" mean in this context?
thank you, this comment helped a great deal.
Looks like Earendil has a product called Lefos, which is an email-based agent:
https://lefos.com/about
Apparently it’s possible to give it access to much of your Google account:
https://lefos.com/terms
I didn’t see a pricing page, but there is this:
> Lefos uses a credit-based billing system. New accounts receive a limited number of starter credits at no cost. Usage of AI features consumes credits.
> When your credits run out, you can subscribe to a paid plan to receive additional credits each billing cycle. Subscriptions are processed through Polar, our billing provider. You can manage or cancel your subscription at any time from your account settings.
Understandable, I'd probably do the same in his position. Still sucks, we've seen this pattern a thousands times before and what happens next is pretty obvious.
I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.
I suggest you make yourself a private fork of Pi so that you don't have to be beholden to Mario and his not-so-new clique.
Create a private repo in GitHub first, then do a bare Git clone of https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono.git (ideally do it before the original repo gets moved to Earendil's GitHub org).
then push that bare clone up to your private repo: Afterwards, delete that bare clone and clone your new private repo, then set upstream to the original badlogic/pi-mono repo: How long you want to continue pulling from "upstream" depends on your comfort level. At the very least, aim for v0.65.2, which is the last tagged release before today's announcement (commit hash 573eb91). Personally, I would continue to pull right up until the next tagged release.I can already see in https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/commit/6d2d03dcc9a39e60c... that the Earendil announcement will be popping up in the next released version of Pi. Even has a dumb pic of Mario, Armin, and I presume Colin, which will be displayed in Pi: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/6d2d03dcc9a39e60c37...
With that little how-to guide out of the way, here's what I think:
Mario is free to do whatever and not give a shit about what the internet at large thinks of him. By that metric, he's doing a hell of a job with that rambling blog post. Likewise, I'm also free to mostly concur with the internet at large (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688794) and prepare simple mitigations like above that can blunt this to a certain degree. Let's just hope that Mario and Armin don't take the "flicker company" approach (his derogatory term for Anthropic) and DMCA the shit out of any private repos.
Like he iterates in the blog post multiple times: It's still MIT licensed, you can fork it to your heart's content. Or keep using the mainline and merge new features to your own fork.
> I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.
For what it's worth, it's pretty straightforward to recreate it I found, at least it's base idea. Readline w/ nice output is a bit of a pain, but still, doable, and if you don't care about that part of it, then the overall agent loop that you'd build on top of? You could build it, I promise.
The company is from the person who created Flask which has remained very open and free. It might be a little too early to be cynical about this.
Or fork it?
Mario having to write this many words to justify this decision alone is a red flag already. The fact I can't understand what Earendil is after reading this many words is an even bigger red flag.
But who am I to judge? If I made a project as popular as pi I'd sell out so fast.
There is variation in how comfortable someone is with the idea of "selling out". It seems to me that Mario is less comfortable than many other people in the AI space. How comfortable someone is with the idea of selling out doesn't really seem like a good signal for how bad something is.
If Mario had instead just written: "I'm excited to work on the future of PI at Palantir." and nothing else, clearly this is worse?
> The fact I can't understand what Earendil is
From the article:
> I learned a few things. My European brain thinks pi is just another small, mildly useful OSS project of mine with no commercial value. My peers in the space seem to think it has properties that make it stand out over the alternatives. VCs and big corps seem to think that pi has commercial value. Some demonstrated their conviction by sending term sheets or "dream job" offers.
Mario thinks there's no commercial value, but clearly some VC people do. If you have the VC money, but don't have any ideas for how to justify commercial viability, why bother? If someone just handed me a big bag of cash and told you to just "do something", I could imagine coming up with Earndil. Make a nice landing page, write some nice guiding principles, and figure out the AI stuff later.
> The fact I can't understand what Earendil is after reading this many words is an even bigger red flag.
Same, but I heard about Armin Ronacher, and the things I heard were not exactly terrible. He's the creator of the Flask microframework, he's contributed to open source more than most people. Perhaps it'll be fine!
And, as Mario has written about ten times in his post: Pi is MIT licensed and it's not hard to find the "fork" button on GitHub.
In light of all the stuff about Thiel and friends, I'd really stay away from Tolkien/Middle-Earth themed startup names for now...
Any naming related to LotR in the tech industry is a glaring red flag, including this company.
It's called out in the post:
> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are basically well-meaning hippies in my book
don't let the nazis take lotr from us
Why does everything have to be named after Lord of the bloody Rings
Everyone wants to be the One to rule them all.
I just want to retire in the Shire away from this AI non-sense (no jabs, just mild burnout).
At least its this and not a book i actually care about. I shudder to think of a world where all the tech companies are called like 'Ghola', 'Giedi Prime', 'Heighliner', 'Harkonnen' etc
Pi isn't
Because it takes years to get paradigm-shifting tech off the ground.
You need hyper-obsessive nerds (the kind who were hyper-obsessive in school about D&D and LotR) to bring it to fruition.
The non-LotR namers give up early.
This makes absolutely no sense.
And yet somehow it works...
My experience with pi coding agent was having a session, exiting and then waiting 1min for the session to resume. I don't know why people praise this tool, as someone used to claude code, I never experienced this kind of poor performance beforehand.
I went to Earendil website and github and I still don't know what this is. Someone care to explain?
it's an agent product that you interact with over email. it has skills and stuff. it has multiplayer. so it's something like openclaw, but different.
As somebody who considered building with Pi, I think I like this. I can imagine some good coming out of this for the ecosystem.
And if they mess it up, it’ll be easy enough to fork.
I think it's a bit sad that we often say people "Sold out". Sometimes, I agree, but often, I point out that until the lady at the grocery store stops asking me for money when I walk up to check out, I need to pay my bills to eat.
I contribute to open source projects, but none of them to date could support me buying much more than a beer. If one took off such that I could "live" off it, I would be happy to leave my current job and dive all in. Until then, I just keep plodding along.
Been following Mario and Armin (much longer), and this is a good move for all parties involved. Would have been bad if Pi went the same direction as RoboVM (mentioned in the post). Earendil, as a company, is not clear for me yet but one of the projects Armin is working on that's part of this is Absurd[0], which is also an interesting project. Absurd, like Pi, is minimal and let's you have full control.
[0] - https://github.com/earendil-works/absurd
I guess Earendil sounds a lot like Anduril - had to check and now I understand they are not defense contractors!
Got similar vibes from that name but because it sounds like a LOTR thing and that (sadly) makes me think Palantir.
Very much an LOTR thing.
Tolkien stole the name from an Anglo Saxon poem, with a somewhat unclear meaning. His version of the story is woven through lots of his work, from the very earliest days. You could view all of Middle-earth as elaborating on his attempt to assign a meaning to it.
I had to check as well. Their logos are also similar.
You didn’t sell out, you bought in! Really excited to follow this journey, Pi has been my favorite piece of software to use in the last six months.
Piloting OSS is all the work of any other business and more. It is a more challenging path and all your decisions are out in the open for scrutiny. He made a decision to put his family first, and I respect that. It seems like there is an alternative to selling out, trusting the project to other people committed to OSS. The beauty of OSS is that this path is still available for people.
I found out last night via pi.dev. And the new repo of pi didn’t exist yet.
I have been working with pi-mono locally for a few months now. Great code base to study. Much higher quality than CC. (I have posted a gist analysis before.)
Will keep an eye on the work of these talented engineers and entrepreneurs. Good luck guys!
Eventually, everyone has a "price" or a "figure" they are thinking about in their heads. That's fine and I don't think Mario made any promises here about Pi.
However, the worst ones are the ones who preach to others about never selling out whilst telling others that they are there for the long-term publicly, but will privately sell out the minute the offer is greater and exclusive to them.
The point here is not make such promises. People who preach one thing and then are tested to do another are the ones to avoid.
> Why would you do that?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kcet4aPpQ
> The one thing that differentiated Armin from other internet trolls was the way he conducted himself in these heated discussions. He was never emotional or aggressive. Our discussions would either end in cordial disagreement, or a newfound common understanding. That's extremely rare on the internet.
Ah haha so armin is also an Internet troll, right? For example if I said, one thing that sets the "Concorde apart from other commercial airliners, ..." I am saying the Concorde is a commercial airliner.
yes, but ;)
tbh. it sounds a bit like he himself was somewhat of an internet troll during that time
and it might not be quite the same definition of "internet troll" I tend to us
like it sounds a lot like a definition of "toll" like
- "very vocal, convicted of their opinion, non stop discussing(/neutral) potentially for the sake of discussing(/neutral)"
while I tend to associate more something like
- "intentional annoying, non stop discussing for the sake of annoying people, often using dishonest discussion techniques, potentially outright harassment"
Another one is:
> Colin is pretty OK for an ex-finance dude
Making it look like the author disapproves of finance dudes but finds Colin tolerable yet still within the expected parameters of badness.
The ear endil website runs at like 2fps on my phone. Still have no idea what the company does
Waiting for the Anschluss of the Austrian School of Vibecoding to ClosedAI. They already got ClosedClaw.
Wow so witty!
> I think Armin and I first met 14 years ago, on the r/austria subreddit. We did not align politically on many things, him being a "hyper neoliberal" and me being a "social democrat" (at least according to what I feel was our mutual impression of each other). Any time I saw that @mitsuhiko handle in a thread, I felt the urge to tell someone they are wrong on the internet.
> Over coffee, Armin and I found we had more in common than we thought. Not only politically, but also in the way we think about software, and OSS specifically. In my recollection, we became actual friends that day, even if we didn't meet again for many years in real life.
This is probably the "highest value" part of that whole blog post, as this is something I see so frequently in the real world. People don't give others a chance to just be humans with conflicting views and opinions, and instead try to assign a label to the other part as quickly as possible, then they apply the same "rules of engagement" with that person, as anyone else who deserved to get that label. But once you forgo it, you realize how much you have in common even with your "worst enemies".
It goes both ways too, and the more closed up you are in that regard, others will treat you the same. But you miss out on so many interesting thoughts, ideas and conversations, when you limit yourself to labels and not realizing how diverse and interesting even the most "boring person" could be, given the right questions and the right conversation underlay.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688206
Incidentally pi stopped working today - under the Claude subscription ban for other harnesses. Awaiting a plugin that fixes it.
How is anthropic enforcing the ban, are there identifiers sent from harnesses?
From the Claude Code codemap leak, it seems like Claude Code is sending metadata about the binary that is sending HTTP requests
It's got a little zig mystery blob that does the hashing. Messing with that would run afoul of DMCA anticircumvention right?
they but "minimal dump DRM" into their client (supposedly, from people which leaked the linked source code, no me)
easy to circumvent
but would fall under "circumventing security protections"/"hacking their API"/etc. And due to the sometimes very unreasonable laws the US has in that area they can use that to go after anyone providing a workaround.
Through that maybe won't work well for the EU, I'm not sure how much the laws have been undermined in recent years but we had laws which made it explicitly legal to circumvent DRM iff it's for the sake of producing compatibility (with some caveats).
I think the law just says that it's legal to circumvent DRM for compatibility - they don't define DRM or compatibility. It's one of those vague laws that you only know if it matters when it gets tested in court.
I think if you were going to send the same harness/prompt traffic as Claude Code, then you’d just use Claude Code. Alternatives generally are trying to do something different, thus are going to be easy to detect.
I wouldn’t imagine that fingerprinting them based on request patterns is very difficult.
until your account gets banned.
you can figure out the fingerprinting today, but if they change it tomorrow and wait 5 months to force update everyone, they will catch you and ban
They can just look at the system prompt or tool definitions.
Just pay for credits :(
At least they didn't call it Open pi.
Not yet. :)
open pi for all humanity - opah for short
That's what happens when you sniff your own farts too much, folks.
In his head, it's the biggest selling pitch ever. No one can even begin to understand that your selling, what your product is...
Stop using llms you're all worse then crack addicts
Such an indirect writing style.
I know people hate LLM writing but at least it gets to the point and gives some background context. I have no idea what this guy is talking about. It's an article aimed at people who know him personally, it seems.
Mario, You are allowed to sell out.
Just take the negative reactions, (if any) as warnings. They have seen it all before like you have:
+ VC funded
+ LoTR name (really?)
+ “We are not evil I promise”
And the biggest red flag:
> None of the early-stage investors are on my naughty list, quite the opposite.
For now.
Happy for Mario, Pi is the best harness I've ever tried. But overall disappointed by this decision. "This time everything is different" until it's not.
Things can be worse - this decision means 2 out of the 3 principals of the Vienna School of Agentic Coding have not sold out to OpenAI
yet
I don't understand. Why the disappointment? Pi is still open source. Nothing is changing. Earendil's majority owners have a perfect track record when it comes to open source. Armin is a super star in the Python and Rust ecosystems.
I mean what is the alternative here?
Mario maintains the project pro bono, which is only possible because he had an exit a couple of years ago. I believe it is a lot of work making sure that the quality of the codebase doesn't detoriate with the onslaught of slop that is hitting open source projects right now.
Additionally, I have massive respect for Armin and I don't believe Earandil is your typical VC startup that wants to grow no matter what.
I’m not disappointed. It seems philosophically the teams are aligned and Pi as a project can continue and be supported. It’s a better outcome than most could expect.
In a world with certain incentives, one must always expect people to act in accordance with them. If you don't like it, change the incentives or cope.
I can just see you telling that to a slave in 1830. What? You don't like slavery? Don't you see that you have to expect the slave owners to act in accordance with the incentives god gave them and force you to gather cotton until your hands bleed? change it or cope dude. Or someone watching from the hills as the horde of Gengis Khan torches their city and puts everyone they've ever known to the sword - those mongols are activing in accordance with incentives! Change it or cope!
The slaves did in fact change the incentives by staging a civil war.
What an incredibly creative retelling of history
This is so disappointing. Finally we had a fantastic, fully OSS, non-profit harness. Very extensible, well-made, minimal, untainted. None of the baggage of OpenCode both in terms of codebase as well as its.. "passionate" leadership, to put it mildly.
> Earendil is a public benefit corporation
Ah, so like OpenAI then.
> But I've also learned what I do not want. I do not want to build my own company around pi. We have a four-year-old kid. I want to watch and help him grow up as best as I can. This is, first and foremost, what I want. Everything else is secondary to that. In the past 2 months, he cried a lot because "daddy isn't here". I never ever want to experience that again.
That's completely fair. And above it, you sketch exactly what you could've done instead to solve this:
> I mostly handed over the reins to a beautiful team of core contributors in 2016, who to this day keep the project well maintained. I never commercialized libGDX, unless you consider it commercialization to build a proprietary piece of software like Spine on top of it.
Sounds like the above worked great, and this would've been the obvious option to do once again.
> part of me wants to take this further. That includes building a team. It also includes commercialization to feed the team, done in a way that doesn't repeat the shit I lived through with RoboVM.
So this is the only part that really answers the "why" - you want to earn a living from working on Pi, and presumably (?) believe you can't achieve that with OSS. I think you're wrong, and belong to the 0.001% of OSS projects that can earn a very nice living from working on Pi without taking this step. I'm not exaggerating, I would fully agree that the number of OSS projects where this is possible is exceedingly small. But this is one of them. If you don't believe that then fair enough, I guess, though I'm curious why you believe that. Because there clearly exist a good number of OSS projects that make their lead developer a very comfortable living. Which condition do those projects satisfy that Pi doesn't?
If that's not it, then the article doesn't really answer the "why" despite lots of text that appears to do so.
You obviously owe me, or anyone really, nothing. So far all you've done is contribute for free. But if you're going to write this kind of article to clearly do a little bit of soul searching, assuaging fears and "make things public" to stop them weighing on your mind, then it looks better to go all the way and state things in plain terms.
> So this is the only part that really answers the "why" - you want to earn a living from working on Pi, and presumably (?) believe you can't achieve that with OSS. I think you're wrong, and belong to the 0.001% of OSS projects that can earn a very nice living from working on Pi without taking this step. I'm not exaggerating, I would fully agree that the number of OSS projects where this is possible is exceedingly small. But this is one of them. If you don't believe that then fair enough, I guess, though I'm curious why you believe that. Because there clearly exist a good number of OSS projects that make their lead developer a very comfortable living. Which condition do those projects satisfy that Pi doesn't?
Because he wants to have tons of money in the bank and get up every day to go do anything he wants with his four-year-old kid when he wakes up. Building something in a couple months that got popular enough to be able to this is amazing. Not check GitHub issues and PRs from ClawdBot5000 and hope he'll make some money from it in 5 years.
We're entering a new world of software development that allows people with no coding experience to do things like build their own mobile apps, websites, and all sorts of other things that were previously reserved for only technical people. The gap is closing quickly. At this point, if you're a "real" developer and have an app that somebody wants to purchase, you'd be crazy not to take the offer if it's a good amount and have cash in the bank that would allow you to do your own stuff in the future without worrying about $dayjob.
I don't think Earendil and OpenAI seem very similar. The former is a tiny startup of friends working on exclusively open source stuff.
What the hell is going on with all these weird tech bros naming their companies after Tolkein mythos?
> You cannot imagine what people called me on social media and via email, despite me having zero control over the situation
Well, perhaps they were right. Naturally when it comes to open source, people don't have any control over what others do with their own time. If they do not contribute financially (or their own time into improvement a project) then even less so. Still, it is a decision that has been made because of prioritising one's own personal goals. This is fine; but to expect that others share the same 1:1 opinion is not logical.
> Like me, he thinks open-source and open protocols are a necessity, not just lipstick on a corporate pig.
I think the description is also painting lipstick on a pig. I've seen too many who promote open source but then sell out suddenly. Github? And what is the influence Shopify is doing in the ruby ecosystem? But anyway, that is all their own personal thing. To assume any community needs to share those personal success stories ... it makes no sense.
> Earendil's products are built on top of pi.
Ok, so ... that is lipstick. Aka promo. I don't understand why he critisizes others but then does the same himself. Which is fine; I just don't get the assessment he is doing.
> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies.
Here he refers to Palantir clearly. Thiel is abusing Tolkien IMO. Or he sees himself as Sauron or whatever. But he is more a clown Sauron, just like his mad orange king is.
> who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around.
Does AI serve humans? Or does it serve those who control it?
> Finally, and most importantly to me, almost everyone on the team has kids.
So what? I mean, many people who are not so well in the head, had kids. I am not saying that refers to the blog author here, mind you - I refer to the "my criterium is that all have kids". Pity on those fools who don't have kids then?
> pi is owned by Earendil, the company.
Ultimately people will derive value from it, or not; but it is clearly a private project. Even if open source, we can see that with chrome + Google. Google makes most decisions. Yes, you can build on top of it; I use thorium right now, for instance. But I am not fooled one second who effectively controls a project here.
Best luck of success to him.
>And if you ever feel like we've lost the plot, the fork button on GitHub still works. Always will.
Lol, the attitude. 180 degrees from the community that gave him everything he has. Classic.
Oh, catch yourself. Tell me you wouldn't do the same for your family.
I run a tiny thing that a lot of people like. Its licence is permissive: if I 'sold out', nobody who is using it today would have to change a damned thing.
And you know what? Call me if you wanna buy it. Because here's my priority list:
1. Looking after my family.
2. Looking after yours.
Lol, this is like the fourth time you've edited your comment which started as 1. Mine / 2. Yours. Take it easy, the crowd isn't going to come down hard on you.
There's nothing wrong with making money, I'm 100% all-in on capitalism.
It's just the sudden change in attitude, particularly when people jump to the polar opposite they've preached their whole lives. Some say it's wise to change your mind, I just find it repulsive.
Did he preach open source all his life? He seems to have been a long time open source builder who has also previously sold a project.