Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi — SkimNews
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- Claude Code was retired as the author’s main coding harness after more than a year of accumulated frustrations, and the author moved their development setup to Pi.
- Anthropic announced Claude Code support for AGENTS.md one day after that decision, but the author considered it too late; the formats had required copying or symlinking between AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files in GitHub repositories.
- Claude Code can automatically add selected VSCode text to model context, but only one IDE session can be connected at a time; a second tab misses text-selection events, a bug reported since December 2025 and closed as a duplicate of an unrelated issue.
- Claude Code’s official VSCode GUI extension allows multiple tabs but has half its built-in slash commands broken, no custom status-line support, and chronological subagent output that becomes difficult to read with multiple agents.
- Anthropic shipped 244 Claude Code releases this year, and more than three-quarters changed system prompts or tool descriptions that can alter model performance, including when new instructions conflict with user prompts or repository conventions.
- Claude Code still carries more overhead than Pi despite an 80% system-prompt reduction, while its default Bash tool description consumes nearly 3,000 tokens, mostly on git instructions and opening GitHub pull requests.
- Pi has proved stable and customizable after initial setup, and the author built an extension supporting multiple open tabs in about 20 minutes.
Why it matters: For Anthropic, Claude Code’s feature pace creates a measurable tradeoff: over three-quarters of 244 releases changed prompts or tool descriptions, while the default Bash description still carries nearly 3,000 tokens. Under the author’s 1-million-DAU, 100-million-request assumptions, trimming 1,000 tokens would save millions of dollars annually, making stability and instruction efficiency core product concerns.
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