A longtime Claude Code user quits over 244 releases and constant churn
Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi
After more than a year using Claude Code daily, the author is switching to Pi, an open-source coding harness. The reasons pile up: AGENTS.md support arrived too late, only one session can connect to VSCode at a time, the GUI extension is half-broken, and 244 releases this year — most rewriting the system prompt — keep breaking personal setups. Claude Code, he argues, lacks a strong vision and no one to say no.
Ultimately, CC feels like a product without a strong vision or direction. It's as if a bunch of excited engineers and PMs are rapidly tacking on whatever features suit their workflow… but without consideration for how this might make things worse for other users.
- bottlepalm
I used to use ChatGPT/Claude in the TUI up until like 3 months ago, but my usage of LLMs has exploded - many sessions across many projects. I feel like I outgrew the TUI and now I'm using ChatGPT/Claude desktop. VS Code has become a code review tool and place where I manage git if need be.
The GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, which makes history easier and cleaner to scroll through, also no scrolling bugs, rich text is easier to read with tables, and images integrated into the chat, resources like browsers in the context of the session. Drag and drop session organization (pins), scheduled tasks, etc.. all that in the side bar.
Usually a TUI would be open in VS Code and scoped to whatever repo I'm working with so 10 projects, 10 VS Code instances open, not super scalable. With the GUI desktop app it's one app, and I can start sessions in an repo and switch between them easily, no need to open VS Code for each. I don't see what could make me want to go back to using a TUI.
Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?
- leobuskin
Pi is a good harness (I finally gave it a try w/ abliterated GLM), but not with Anthropic subscription, and there are multiple reasons to avoid alternative harnesses with their models in general (imho):
1. Potential ban due to ToS violation;
2. It doesn't follow all Anthropic's communication mechanisms out-of-the-box, they heavily use custom headers, hidden flags, and undocumented API features that affect models' behavior;
3. Compact is better in CC (significantly);
4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);
5. It's almost unavoidable to use Pi's extensions, and I wouldn't trust my oauth token to anything third-party (take a look at regular reddit/X posts where people getting banned due to such leaks and abuse) -> it takes enormous amount of hacking on top of Pi to get closer to CC abilities.
CC has hooks and mods, even ui_* (undocumented) protocol if you need some big customization, those are enough to implement whatever you want on top of CC.
Also, I'm working with CC from the very first versions, as for me - it's the best harness (as-is) on the market. I have zero clue what problems people are talking about (except known big issues, 3-4 over the years, I've never had serious problems, at all). Seamless and smooth experience, optimized for Anthropic models.
P.S. You can consider this as Stockholm syndrome effect, but... you have close to zero chances to get unbanned with Anthropic, and it's the best coding […]
- ftchd
> The AGENTS.md thing kind of epitomizes the whole reason I decided to quit using Claude Code.
Do I understand correctly that this decision was taken based on something that's not accurate? Claude has been reading AGENTS.md files for a while now.
- gvkhna
Pi is without contest the best harness. Because it’s yours, the total control is the only way to move from driving agents to orchestrating them.
My interruptions and frustration with llms has gone down a cliff. It’s amazing to see what just a few lines of system prompt really can do to keep agents doing the correct thing much more often.
- godber
Yeah, this post calls out one of the major risks of making it easier to write more software. More features put more cognitive load on your users. If you introduce those new features unobtrusively it might be OK, but if you force it on them, you may lose them as users.
- siraben
I've been daily driving Pi for over a month now and never looking back. The latest crop of frontier models have really complex bash calls, so I've written an extension that rewrites them into plain English while still making them easy to reveal in full, unlike some harnesses which seem to try to hide this from the user which is pretty irresponsible IMO.[0]
- jeena
This is interesting, I've been using claude for work stuff because they pay the $200 subscripion but at home I've been using pi with glm-5.3-flash and now deepseekv4.1-flash.
When I'm doing work stuff I'm really not liking claude and only using it because anthropic doesn't allow other harnesses. If work would give me a $20 ollama cloud subscription in place of the $200 claude one I would be much more happy at work, that's how much I dislike it.
- brabel
The author is complaining about Claude Code inside VSCode. The complaints don’t apply to the Claude Desktop App, for the most part. You don’t need VSCode to review code, just use the Claude app which has good support already.
And if you’re moving to Pi, maybe use it with ThinkRail, from JetBrains. It’s my favorite harness since it can do everything I want: multiple models including local, focus on reviewing code after the agents are done, uses worktrees by default. And it adds some nifty tools for designing software which I am really enjoying. One thing it can’t do is let you edit files :) but that is ok, in the rare case I write something I use emacs, thank God no more need for a heavy IDE!
- kschiffer
I built a Claude Code mod that displays a dashboard linking issues/PRs to claude sessions and allowing me to organize my work more around activities, such as reviewing, working on issues, fixing PRs, developing specs and ad hoc sessions.
As someone coming from a vim in tmux, keyboard only workflow, this works most naturally for me without needing to break out of the terminal.
Also it's nice that it is a self referential setup that can be easily developed and enhanced right while working on things in Claude Code.
I'm sure many of you are building similar personalized setups.
- srid
I switched from Claude Code to Oh My Pi via https://agent-distro.nixos.asia and have never looked back.
On My Pi is what I use for other models too: codex, opencode go, etc.