I don’t know Pi well. I used it for a few small tasks and appreciated how minimal it felt. My news reader has become my test task for trying different agent tools against the same problem, so I rebuilt it with Pi to explore further. My opinions here may not survive deeper use, but the way I think about it: Claude Code is Django, Pi is Flask.
Claude Code ships with WebFetch, WebSearch, sub-agents, MCP support, a permissions system, and a whole settings infrastructure. You get a lot for free. The tradeoff is that you can’t easily remove what you don’t need. You may not use MCP or sub-agents, but they’re still there in the system prompt and the runtime. Like Django’s ORM, you lose more from fighting the built-in pieces than from just using them.