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miniPI is a minimal coding agent for the terminal, built as a single native Go binary. It reads your `~/.pi` configuration directly, starts instantly, and needs no Node.js.

It keeps what matters in a coding agent: the agent loop, tools, skills, JSONL sessions. Everything else — extensions, MCP, RPC mode, package management, self-update — is gone.

Lineage

miniPI is not a from-scratch project. It descends directly from Pi:

pi  →  PiG  →  miniPI

• pi is the original minimal, extensible agent harness by Mario Zechner and Earendil Works. Its behavior is the reference: miniPI targets upstream pi 1.0.3 semantics.
• PiG is a pure-Go port of pi. miniPI is a heavily trimmed fork of PiG: the Go engine, the TUI and the parity-tested core come from there.
• miniPI cuts the fork down to the essentials and rebrands it as what it always was — a pi.

What is inside

• Agent loop with tools (read, bash, edit, write), compaction, and sub-session support
• Skills discovered from ~/.pi/agent/skills, project .pi/skills, and --skill paths
• JSONL sessions with resume, fork, branch tree and export
• Fullscreen TUI with differential rendering, Kitty keyboard protocol, syntax highlighting, markdown, LaTeX, mermaid and images
• llama.cpp support with chat-template thinking detection and per-level probing
• Full ~/.pi compatibility — settings, auth, models, themes and keybindings files are shared with pi as-is

Download

Prebuilt binaries for Linux and Windows are attached to each release. Pick the one for your platform, make it executable, and put it on your PATH:

chmod +x miniPI-linux-amd64
mv miniPI-linux-amd64 ~/.local/bin/pi

On Windows, rename miniPI-windows-amd64.exe to pi.exe and place it on your PATH.

Getting started

Or build it yourself:

./build.sh

Then run it in any project:

cd /path/to/project
pi

Sign in to a provider with /login, or point at your own endpoints in ~/.pi/agent/models.json. Local llama.cpp models appear automatically when the server is running.

Notes

• The TUI runs in fullscreen by default. PgUp/PgDn scroll by page, Alt+o/Alt+i scroll up and down, Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End jump to the edges, and everything is rebindable in ~/.pi/agent/keybindings.json.
• Themes are pi theme JSON files. ~/.pi/agent/themes/ is picked up automatically; dark-legacy restores the classic pi 0.84 dark palette.
• quietStartup: "header" in settings silences offline-provider warnings at launch.
• Version numbers follow miniPI itself (0.1.0); behavior targets upstream pi 1.0.3.

Credits

miniPI stands on the work of two upstreams: pi by Mario Zechner and Earendil Works, and the Go port PiG by Michael Kinsy. The bundled pi source excerpts carry their own license at tui/widthx/testdata/pi/LICENSE.pi.

License

MIT