If you've been following the AI coding agent space, you've likely heard of Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Codex. But there's a fast-moving open-source alternative sitting at over 46,000 GitHub stars that deserves a serious look: pi, from earendil-works/pi.
This article walks you through what pi actually is, how to get it running in under five minutes, and whether it's worth adding to your workflow.
What Is Pi?
Pi is a monorepo of tools built for constructing and running AI agents. The centerpiece is a coding agent CLI — a terminal-based assistant that can read your files, write code, run shell commands, and iterate on tasks, all within your actual project directory.
The repo is built entirely in TypeScript and ships as a set of npm packages:
