Earendil shipped Pi 1.0 on October 1, 2026 — a hardened, minimal, MIT-licensed terminal coding-agent harness you can actually depend on. Hundreds of thousands of people already use Pi weekly. This is the “we waited until it stuck” release, not a kitchen-sink rewrite.
What landed in 1.0
Headline additions: Codemode (native MCP support and non-LLM models), deferred tool loading, virtual-model extensions, Anthropic cache warming, mid-conversation system messages, a new TUI theme, and full-screen mode by default. The philosophy is still minimal — they say a longer list of ideas fell off the wall than made it in.
Alongside Pi 1.0 they shipped experimental Pi Durable for longer-running, crash-resilient agent apps that need to live outside a single terminal session. Same values, different shape. If your pain is “agent dies when the laptop sleeps,” that package is the one to watch.
Install and poke
Docs and install live at pi.dev. Quick path: curl -fsSL https://pi.dev/install.sh | sh (PowerShell installer on Windows). Code is at github.com/earendil-works/pi. I care about harnesses that stay thin enough to audit and extensible enough to wire into local inference — Pi plus something like Magnitude is exactly that combo.
What I like about Earendil’s posture is patience. Agent tooling churns weekly. Most of that churn does not survive a month. Pi waits until a feature has proven itself — Codemode and MCP included — then weighs real function against added complexity. That matches how I want harnesses on etherninja gear: thin enough to read, strict enough that a bad plugin cannot silently own the box, flexible enough to point at local inference when I do not want tokens leaving the LAN.
Codemode in practice means the model can write a short script that calls tools, filters results, and keeps you in the loop instead of dumping a giant tool transcript into context every turn. Deferred tool loading helps the same problem from the other side. If you have ever watched an agent drown in schema noise, you already know why that matters.
Next step: install Pi 1.0, turn on Codemode with one MCP server you already trust, and run a real repo task before you decorate it with plugins.
Happy hacking.
References & Further Reading
- Earendil – Pi 1.0 announcement – Official 1.0 feature list and install commands.
- Pi – Product / docs home.
- Pi Changelog – Release history.
- GitHub – earendil-works/pi – MIT source.
- Earendil – Pi Durable – Experimental long-running agent substrate.
- Pi Docs – Codemode – MCP / scripted tool-calling mode.