Why One Developer Swapped Claude Code for Pi
A developer named Caleb has gone public with his decision to switch coding tools, citing friction in his working setup. Pi lets you plug in AI models from several different companies, but you have to bring your own keys or subscription.
Developer Caleb says he has switched his main AI coding tool from Claude Code to Pi. In a personal post published on September 21, he laid out his reasons for the change and what the experience has been like.
The post landed on Hacker News on November 8, where it picked up a score of 360 and 219 comments. Caleb pointed to friction in three areas: integration with the VS Code editor, extensions, and managing the files that hold his working instructions. He also said he was tired of the tool changing so often.
What actually changes with Pi
The biggest difference is how you choose which AI model to connect to. Claude Code is a coding tool built by Anthropic. Pi is a separate tool that lets you plug in models from multiple companies, with support for models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. It also lets you swap models mid-task.
Pi is an open-source coding tool for the terminal, driven by typed commands. It ships with the basic tooling an agent, an AI that handles work on its own, needs to read, write, and edit files. It can also use a shell to run commands on your machine. Users lean on these capabilities to hand coding work over to the AI.
How it works can be customized through extensions, skills, and predefined instruction templates. The idea is to save your prompts, the instructions you give the AI, as templates and pull them up when needed.
Installing it and getting model access
You can install Pi yourself by following the setup instructions in its public repository, which is released under the MIT license. To connect a model, though, you will need to supply your own API key, the credential a developer uses to authenticate against a service, or one of the subscriptions Pi supports.
The scope of the built-in feature set also factors into the decision. According to Pi’s official documentation, subagents, which split work across multiple agents, and plan mode are not included out of the box. Being able to connect many models is one thing, but whether the features your usual workflow depends on are part of the default setup is worth checking separately.
Caleb changed tools based on the friction he personally ran into. Korean users weighing the same move would want to look further into whether model access and payment work from within Korea, how well it handles Korean-language work, and what the same tasks end up costing.