Building pi in a World of Slop — Mario Zechner

All I wanted was a shitty coding agent that is truly mine. And I’d have loved to just tell you why and how I built pi. But then Peter decided to make it the agentic core of OpenClaw. And now pi is collateral. So yes, this is a talk about pi. But it is also a talk about how agents are destroying OSS, how I deal with that, and a plea to slow the fuck down. https://x.com/badlogicgames https://github.com/badlogic   / mariozechner   Timestamps 0:00 – Intro and motivation for building pi 0:29 – Act 1: Building pi and the frustration with existing agent harnesses 1:56 – Why current context management in tools like Cloud Code and Open Code fails 4:44 – The importance of minimal harnesses and the "Terminal" benchmark 5:35 – Introducing pi: A self-modifying, extensible agent core 7:27 – The "YOLO" security philosophy and extensibility through TypeScript 9:03 – Examples of pi extensions (chat rooms, NES, Doom) 10:46 – Act 2: OSS in the age of "clankers" and how to fight them 12:03 – Act 3: A plea to slow down and stop the "slop" in software development 13:58 – How agents create "enterprise-grade complexity" and why humans are still the bottleneck 16:12 – Practical advice: How to effectively integrate agents into your workflow --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/RjfbvDXpFls... Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney ---