It feels like when you do a fresh Windows install and you have to debloat it from all the spyware and candy crush type games.

Pi is the perfect clean slate, I absolutely love it.

I really like the simplicity of HN and this kinda keeps it (somewhat) in a way that I like.

When the comment overlay is open however, I was expecting tapping outside of it to close the overlay btw, not to let me tap the underlying stories and get redirected.

Beyond the target age of your book but when I was 7-8 years old my favorite book was a science book that had interactive experiments. Hope your book leaves the same kind of positive and memorable impression on kids.

It's a durable orchestration loop for implementing code with LLMs that forces review and verification gates until the code matches exactly what you asked for.

It's complementary to any existing harness or tools you use, you investigate and plan your work and simply have your agent hand off the implementation to the engine.

You can have Opus 4.8 implementing, GPT 5.5 and DeepSeek reviewing in different roles etc, mix and match however you like.

It also supports sandboxing out of the box, starting with the YC backed Microsandbox.

I believe the people who feel like Fable is a big improvement, for me it's just much more reasonable and grounded.

It makes me realize how much of a try hard over optimizing planner GPT 5.5 can be. I've been fighting it often to simplify plans.

But no matter the model you can't trust them to actually deliver on very long tasks while maintaining quality. At least not without external orchestration and review.

It's meant for the implementation of well defined tasks/specs while orchestrating a review/fix/verify loop.

Every day I have implementations running for hours non stop, it's simply the time it takes to get a proper and well reviewed implementation with LLMs imo.

It's not me for either currently but that doesn't mean it's not useful.

Although there's a ton of other providers with their own more or less managed/opinionated flavor of agentic sandboxes.

We cataloged a bunch here

https://engine.build/lab/agent-sandboxes

I'll also add boxes.dev to that list.

But yeah overall your tone was asshole flavored lol. Maybe being a bit of a hater too.

Security wise, it's about being able to find and chain multiple vulnerabilities to actually create viable exploits.

So I would imagine that if you were using it for regular software development you may not feel that it's that different unless used in a particular way?

By default it uses pi agent core + pi ai (from the excellent pi coding agent) as a multi model runtime but also supports a Claude Agent SDK runtime.

I can have an implementation and review process of an OpenSpec change run anywhere from 2 hours to 24+ hours going through review/fix/verification rounds automatically until the implementation matches the spec and any additional reviewers are done finding issues after the fix rounds.

it's going to be fully open sourced in the next two weeks and fully free to use

https://engine.build

If you don't want to sign up to be notified by email you can watch the org.

Implementation phases very often go through 5-10 review and fix rounds to actually get the implementation to match the spec. It takes longer but that's what's necessary to get actually good results on long horizon tasks with detailed requirements. I'll be open sourcing it fully soon.

I can still type while doing it but it's so nice to just hold a button (or double tap to lock recording) and just brain dump what I need.

I type very fast but I feel like the unaltered speech to text allows me to express more quickly any uncertainty or doubt that I have or when I don't know exactly how to best ask for what I want.

I also like to play dumb with agents and ask it for the best option for something that I already know the answer to, just to see if it's gonna be correct, it helps get a sense of the limits of each model. That's also quicker on voice.

I don't think it makes use of intonation for the built in one, I use Hex on mac for speech to text

By this pretty cool dude -> https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex

I love coding, it always felt like Legos for adults. Not that Legos aren't also Legos for adults.

But there's no fighting the fact that we won't be writing 99% of the code anymore so I take pleasure in crafting the specs and requirements clearly, that's where I put the effort.

And then to avoid having to babysit the agents to get them to stick to the plan, I built a super robust external orchestrator that forces multiple review and fix rounds until I get the result I want.

I'll be fully open sourcing that soon also https://engine.build

Another round of layoffs at CrowdStrike would fit the pattern nicely.