While researching for this post, I found out something funny. Pi, the most interesting coding agent of 2026, was built by a guy who got fed up with Claude Code. 🥶
Mario Zechner, the creator of libGDX, was a hardcore Claude Code user. He built cchistory just to track its system prompt changes, and even patched the binary to add features Anthropic had not shipped.
Then he quit and wrote his own agent. Four tools, a tiny system prompt, no MCP, no permissions. He named it Pi so nobody could Google it. What a Chad! 🗿
That small project now has 85k+ GitHub stars, powers OpenClaw, and outscored Claude Code on our own tool use benchmark at a fifth of the cost.
So I put the two side by side. The default everyone uses, against the minimal harness built as a rejection of it.
