written on January 31, 2026
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you will have noticed this week that a project of my friend Peter went viral on the internet. It went by many names. The most recent one is OpenClaw but in the news you might have encountered it as ClawdBot or MoltBot depending on when you read about it. It is an agent connected to a communication channel of your choice that just runs code.
What you might be less familiar with is that what’s under the hood of OpenClaw is a little coding agent called Pi. And Pi happens to be, at this point, the coding agent that I use almost exclusively. Over the last few weeks I became more and more of a shill for the little agent. After I gave a talk on this recently, I realized that I did not actually write about Pi on this blog yet, so I feel like I might want to give some context on why I’m obsessed with it, and how it relates to OpenClaw.
Pi is written by Mario Zechner and unlike Peter, who aims for “sci-fi with a touch of madness,” 1 Mario is very grounded. Despite the differences in approach, both OpenClaw and Pi follow the same idea: LLMs are really good at writing and running code, so embrace this. In some ways I think that’s not an accident because Peter got me and Mario hooked on this idea, and agents last year.
What is Pi?
So Pi is a coding agent. And there are many coding agents. Really, I think you can pick effectively anyone off the shelf at this point and you will be able to experience what it’s like to do agentic programming. In reviews on this blog I’ve positively talked about AMP and one of the reasons I resonated so much with AMP is that it really felt like it was a product built by people who got both addicted to agentic programming but also had tried a few different things to see which ones work and not just to build a fancy UI around it.
Pi is interesting to me because of two main reasons:
- First of all, it has a tiny core. It has the shortest system prompt of any agent that I’m aware of and it only has four tools: Read, Write, Edit, Bash.
- The second thing is that it makes up for its tiny core by providing an extension system that also allows extensions to persist state into sessions, which is incredibly powerful.
And a little bonus: Pi itself is written like excellent software. It doesn’t flicker, it doesn’t consume a lot of memory, it doesn’t randomly break, it is very reliable and it is written by someone who takes great care of what goes into the software.