A developer who blogs at caleb.software wrote that they have retired Claude Code as their main coding harness and moved to Pi, an open-source alternative. The post, Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi, is dated September 21 and reached the Hacker News front page on November 8, where it had 306 points by 10:18 UTC.
The author counts “244 releases to Claude Code this year” as of writing and says more than three quarters of them changed the system prompt or tool descriptions. Pi’s GitHub page showed 120.7k stars and an MIT license when we read it on November 8.
Business Pill · The Model and the Harness
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on how a harness around models shapes what they deliver. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Claude Code’s guide.
The key insight: A developer’s post, dated September 21 and on the Hacker News front page on November 8, says they retired Claude Code as their main coding harness for Pi, an MIT-licensed harness. The author counts 244 Claude Code releases this year and says more than three quarters changed the system prompt or tool descriptions.
The author says the move came “due to an accumulation of many small frustrations”. They list several: maintaining CLAUDE.md files alongside AGENTS.md files, only one session at a time being connected to the VS Code editor, and gaps in the official VS Code extension, which they say lacks a custom status line and mixes subagent output into the main thread.
On release pace, the post says: “At the time of writing, there have been 244 releases to Claude Code this year; over 3/4 of these changed the system prompt or tool descriptions, which can substantially change how the LLM performs”. By our arithmetic, three quarters of 244 is 183, so the author’s figure means more than 183 releases changed those texts.
The author also writes that “The default Bash tool’s description is almost 3,000 tokens”, and that Claude Code “still has way more overhead than Pi for seemingly no benefit”. They estimate in a footnote that trimming 1,000 tokens “could literally save millions of dollars in inference costs per year”, on their own assumption of one million daily users and 100 million requests a day.
Why one developer left Claude Code for Pi: 244 Claude Code releases this year, over 3/4 of them changing the system prompt or tool descriptions, per the author (as of 21 Sep); more than 183 is our arithmetic, against 120.7k GitHub stars for Pi. Data: caleb.software; github.com/earendil-works/pi, read 8 Nov 2026.
The Author’s Credit to Anthropic
The post is not only critical. The author writes: “I do think Anthropic has made a really cool piece of software here”, and says later tools like Pi “have the benefit of hindsight to see what works and what doesn’t”. They also expect Claude Code’s release to be seen as “one of the major drivers of this new era of software development we’re in”.
The author’s summary of the product is: “Ultimately, CC feels like a product without a strong vision or direction”. These are the author’s views.
What Pi Is
Pi’s website says: “Pi is a minimal agent harness”. It says Pi “ships with powerful defaults but skips features like sub-agents and plan mode”, and that users can customize it with extensions, skills, prompt templates and themes. The site lists “15+ providers, hundreds of models”, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
Pi’s GitHub repository, earendil-works/pi, showed 120.7k stars, 15.5k forks and 7,655 commits under an MIT license when we read it on November 8. The website says Pi supports AGENTS.md files and has a minimal system prompt.
What Anthropic’s Docs Say
The author writes that a day after they decided to leave, Anthropic announced that Claude Code would support AGENTS.md files. Anthropic’s Claude Code memory documentation, read on November 8, says Claude can read a repository’s AGENTS.md files in place of CLAUDE.md. The docs do not say when that support was added.
Anthropic’s own guide, as we reported this morning, says instructions in CLAUDE.md are requests, while hooks, deny rules and managed settings are enforced.
The Business Lever
Pi’s website lists Anthropic among its model providers, so Claude models can be used inside Pi as well as inside Claude Code. The author’s cost footnote is about tokens spent on Claude Code’s own tool descriptions, which they say Pi keeps smaller with a minimal system prompt.
As we read the post, the author’s complaints are about the harness around the model, such as editor integration, file formats and prompt overhead, rather than about Claude’s models.
As we read Pi’s website, which lists Anthropic among its providers, a user who leaves Claude Code this way can still use Claude models inside another harness.
As we read the sources, they describe one developer’s switch; neither the post nor Pi’s GitHub page measures how many Claude Code users have changed tools.
caleb.software, Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi (21 Sep 2026)
“I do think Anthropic has made a really cool piece of software here.”
Three Implications
FOR TEAMS STANDARDISING ON AN AGENT The author says it sucks for users to have to deal with copying or symlinking between the CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md formats; Anthropic’s docs now say Claude can read AGENTS.md in place of CLAUDE.md.
FOR HEAVY USERS The author says changes to the system prompt or tool descriptions can substantially change how the LLM performs, and counts over 3/4 of 244 releases this year making them.
FOR HARNESS BUILDERS Pi’s website says it skips features like sub-agents and plan mode and lets users add them through extensions.
The essay describes “an operating system that wraps your AI”, “a harness that compresses your thinking, your team’s feedback, and the model’s raw capability into something replicable.”
As we read it, the author’s switch is a choice between two such harnesses around the same family of models. The essay does not discuss Claude Code or Pi.
What Is Not Established
The release counts, the token figure for the Bash tool and the cost estimate are the author’s own and were not checked against Anthropic’s release history for this piece. The post is one developer’s account; it does not show how many Claude Code users have switched tools, and Pi’s star count does not measure active users.
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This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a supply story, and last week as a credit story. This week it was priced as a permission story, and the answer arrived as a cost, not a ban.
A developer’s post on leaving Claude Code for Pi, dated September 21, reached the Hacker News front page on November 8 with 306 points. The author counts 244 Claude Code releases this year and says more than three quarters changed the system prompt or tool descriptions; Pi’s GitHub page showed 120.7k stars and an MIT license.
A note on sourcing. Quotations are from the author’s post on caleb.software, dated September 21, 2026, and from Pi’s website, read on November 8, 2026. GitHub and Hacker News figures were read on November 8. The release and token counts are the author’s; the arithmetic is ours.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
