Discussion
I've sold out
sunaookami: 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.
Maxious: 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
disiplus: yet
rullelito: At least they didn't call it Open pi.
anilgulecha: Incidentally pi stopped working today - under the Claude subscription ban for other harnesses. Awaiting a plugin that fixes it.
politelemon: How is anthropic enforcing the ban, are there identifiers sent from harnesses?
patleeman: 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.
czottmann: Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688206
dra3ks: Waiting for the Anschluss of the Austrian School of Vibecoding to ClosedAI. They already got ClosedClaw.
skrebbel: Wow so witty!
walthamstow: Why does everything have to be named after Lord of the bloody Rings
DoctorDabadedoo: 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).
rafram: I wouldn’t imagine that fingerprinting them based on request patterns is very difficult.
throwaw12: 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
swah: I guess Earendil sounds a lot like Anduril - had to check and now I understand they are not defense contractors!
deaux: 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 corporationAh, 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.
moralestapia: >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.
ontouchstart: 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!
moffers: 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.
unsupp0rted: 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.
colesantiago: This makes absolutely no sense.
inatreecrown2: I read most of the post, went to the linked project and still don't have an idea what this is about.
colesantiago: 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.
embedding-shape: > 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.
budududuroiu: From the Claude Code codemap leak, it seems like Claude Code is sending metadata about the binary that is sending HTTP requests
Maxious: It's got a little zig mystery blob that does the hashing. Messing with that would run afoul of DMCA anticircumvention right?
spicyusername: 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.
teekert: Got similar vibes from that name but because it sounds like a LOTR think and that (sadly) makes me think Palantir.
colinmarc: I don't think Earendil and OpenAI seem very similar. The former is a tiny startup of friends working on exclusively open source stuff.
LexSiga: Indeed. Also what a very annoying website.
duskdozer: Looks like LLM-generated to me
dathinab: they but "minimal dump DRM" into their client (supposedly, from people which leaked the linked source code, no me)easy to circumventbut 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).
pocksuppet: 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.
direwolf20: 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.
Morromist: 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!
pocksuppet: The slaves did in fact change the incentives by staging a civil war.
loveparade: 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.
colinmarc: 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.
solarkraft: 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.
DonsDiscountGas: Or fork it?
DonsDiscountGas: Pi isn't
muragekibicho: 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."
guzfip: We need a cure for autism.
fearmerchant: And yet somehow it works...
heliumtera: 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 the crack addicts
kator: 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.
throwingrocks: I had to check as well. Their logos are also similar.
doginasuit: 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.
dust42: 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 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.
theshrike79: [delayed]
uxcolumbo: 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?
jfengel: 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.
realslimjd: 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.
stantonius: 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.
infinitezest: What an incredibly creative retelling of history
ZeroGravitas: 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.
Lerc: 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?
raincole: 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.
tasuki: > 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.
63stack: Which model are you using it with? I imagine it's bring your own model?
dude250711: Slop.
