Pi Durable

Very cool to see Pi build a durable agent harness too. I've been building in this space for quite some time myself [0][1] and it is a super interesting place of innovation. Less hype-y that on-your-machine coding agents, but all major players are building products in this space: LangChain Deep Agents, Vercel Eve, OpenAI Agents API, Anthropic Managed Agents, etc.

The main reasons are:

1) they are "durable", i.e. easier to make long-running in an unattended way, and easier to implement recovery, monitoring, etc

2) separating the harness from the compute brings safety and scaling benefits

3) easier to make multi-player.

[0] https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed

[1] https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/agent-os/

What are people using these infinitely-running agents for?

> The entire source code, without tests, is about 15,000 lines, which comes out to about 150,000 tokens with GPT and about 250,000 with Claude.

Woah, that big of a difference when it comes to token counting?

I like the multi-user bit the most. Should make it easier to build my remote control tool, as something I've had to hack around is not being able to use ACP while the TUI is active in an instance.

super interesting. I have so many half-considered questions... like sandboxing (it seems like it is BYO). would love to have some kind of policy engine.. perhaps an integration with https://github.com/NVIDIA/openshell in the form of an extension?

also, I see most of the durability promise comes from persisting JSON documents locally and minimizing the amount of context/data kept in-memory, even during SQLite mode. while this makes sense, my own experiments with a process that relied on a JSONL-based event store have led me to prefer keeping things in-memory to avoid all the friction with I/O.. am I crazy for preferring just a straight .db file being persisted?

Brilliant. I wish the the durable application state wasn't restricted to just the json documents though. There should be some sort of integrated way of implementing the outbox pattern so external stores can be synchronized with the conversation state.

Nice! I made my own version of this for Pi but I’m excited to see if I can just replace it lol

Cross-post from the 1.0 thread. I’m currently building a harness for Slack to support our on-call and support channels. It’s been working great so far.

The harness is built on top of the Pi SDK. I initially used Codex, but Pi seems more hackable, and I like that it’s vendor-agnostic by default.

Running it on Kubernetes works, but dealing with the JSONL session files and making sure sessions survive pod interruptions adds some complexity. I’m using DBOS for that right now, which works well, although it still feels like overkill.

This came at just the right time. I’m looking forward to removing the pieces I no longer need and simplifying the architecture. Thanks Pi team!

That code font is painful to read, no syntax highlighting and extremely pixelated. It's retro but an eyesore.