# Agent engineering: Pi

> Source: <https://roman.pt/posts/pi-dev-version/>
> Published: 2026-06-07 09:00:00+00:00

I don’t know [Pi](https://pi.dev) well. I used it for a few small tasks and appreciated how minimal it felt. My [news reader](https://roman.pt/posts/claude-code-as-your-execution-environment/) 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.