A month ago I started building a coding agent from scratch, with one rule: build first, then read. I'd picked pi as my reference precisely because it was described as the smallest serious harness — four packages, four tools, a system prompt under a thousand tokens, and competitive benchmark scores anyway. Build each piece myself, then open pi's version and diff the decisions. Reading first turns study into copying.
Last week I finally opened it. The premise I'd chosen it on was gone.
pi (v0.84)
mine
packages
