Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi
caleb.software published a post dated 21 September 2026 saying its author has retired Claude Code as his main coding harness and moved his development setup to Pi, an open-source coding agent. The author, a full-stack engineer at Salesforce, describes the switch as the result of many small frustrations. The story circulated again on 8 November 2026.
The complaints center on Claude Code's IDE connection and overhead. Only one session can connect to the IDE at a time, so a second tab cannot receive text selection events. The author says this bug was reported in December 2025 and closed as a duplicate of an unrelated issue. Even after cutting 80% of the system prompt, the author says Claude Code carries more overhead than Pi, with a default Bash tool description of almost 3,000 tokens. He counts 244 Claude Code releases this year as of 21 September, with over three-quarters changing the system prompt or tool descriptions.
Timing adds to the story. Anthropic said Claude Code would support AGENTS.md files one day after the author made the decision, which the author called too little, too late. Pi is MIT licensed and was created by Mario Zechner, with ownership moving to Earendil in April 2026. The post describes one developer's experience and does not measure how many Claude Code users have switched.
Why it matters
For companies selling coding agents, the switch points to low switching costs at the harness layer. Pi is open source and works with several model providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and local models through Ollama. A developer can keep a preferred model while changing the interface around it. Vendors that ship frequent prompt and tool changes may also lose trust, since those changes can alter agent behavior from one release to the next.
For investors and operators, access terms matter as much as product quality. Pi warns users when a Claude subscription may draw paid extra usage, and Anthropic's legal page, as one reviewer describes it, points third-party products toward API keys. A community extension that reuses Claude subscription logins carries its own risk, with no warranty or support. Teams building on a model vendor should confirm which access path their tools use before standardizing on them.
Key points
- 1The caleb.software post is dated 21 September 2026 and circulated again on 8 November 2026.
- 2The author counts 244 Claude Code releases in 2026 as of 21 September, over three-quarters changing prompts or tool descriptions.
- 3Claude Code's default Bash tool description runs almost 3,000 tokens, mostly covering git and GitHub pull request steps.
- 4Anthropic announced AGENTS.md support one day after the author decided to leave, which the author says came too late.
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