A Developer Left Claude Code for Pi, Citing 244 Releases and a 3,000-Token Bash Prompt

A developer who writes at caleb.software has published a post titled "Goodbye Claude, hello Pi", saying he has stopped using Claude Code as his main coding harness and moved to Pi, an open-source alternative. The post is dated September 21 and was last updated on November 7.

Everything numeric in it is the author's own count, and he calls much of it "a lot of hating". It is a user report, and it should be read as one.

The complaints, with his numbers

He says Claude Code has had 244 releases in 2026, and that over three quarters of them changed the system prompt or the tool descriptions. He puts the default Bash tool description at almost 3,000 tokens, most of it about git and GitHub pull requests.

His other complaints are smaller and more concrete. Only one Claude Code session can attach to VS Code at a time, so a second tab cannot receive selected text. He says he reported that in December 2025 and the issue was closed as a duplicate of an unrelated one.

He also dislikes keeping CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md in step, which is where the dates matter. He writes that Anthropic announced AGENTS.md support a day after he decided to leave.

What shipped for AGENTS.md

InfoWorld reported on September 21 that Claude Code 2.1.277 reads AGENTS.md when a folder has no CLAUDE.md. Thariq Shihipar, an Anthropic technical staff member, announced the change on X. If both files exist, CLAUDE.md wins.

There is a catch. According to InfoWorld, the feature needs Claude Code to fetch feature flags from Anthropic. Sessions on a third-party provider such as Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex AI, or with telemetry disabled, fall back to CLAUDE.md.

	Claude Code 2.1.277	Pi
AGENTS.md	Read only if no CLAUDE.md in the folder	Loaded from ~/.pi/agent/, parent directories and the current directory
Licence	Not stated in sources read	MIT
Extensions	Not covered here	TypeScript modules

What Pi is

Pi's site describes it as "a minimal agent harness" made by Earendil Inc. and contributors under the MIT licence. It lists more than 15 providers, among them Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, Ollama and OpenRouter, and says extensions are "TypeScript modules with access to tools, commands, keyboard shortcuts, events, and the full TUI".

The author says he wrote an extension in about 20 minutes that adds multi-tab text selection to VS Code. He also says the first few days on Pi "required some finagling".

What the post does not show

The post does not measure output quality. It does not compare cost per task, and its footnote on token savings is, in his words, a back-of-envelope estimate. Pi's site gives no system prompt size to set against the 3,000-token figure.

For how another vendor handles agent spend, see our report on GitHub Copilot's no-spend-cap plans. For what an agent's memory costs and delivers, see Anthropic's agent memory study.

The item to check next is Claude Code's own changelog: whether the Bash tool description keeps shrinking, and whether the AGENTS.md fallback works without feature-flag access.