simple software
For me, pi is the epitome of simple, elegant software. Its maintainers embue true craftmanship into the harness. It allows for endless customization and tinkering. My pi harness truly feels like my own. It frees me from lock-in from any of the multitude of AI companies vying for my wallet and data.
At the same time, its minimal approach leaves certain aspects of a standard "agentic engineering" environment lacking. This also is its beauty, us, the enthusiastic community of pi users, can build and use our tooling to satisfy our workflow. I consider agent sandboxing, native clients, rbac session sharing, and surface automation (namely browser and native apps) to comprise the minimal agentic engineering environment that should be used for software engineers in an organization.
pi pod is an ongoing effort to consolidate all of this capability in a simple and elegant software built around and on top of pi. Using pi pod should feel no different from using the pi harness that you already have spent countless hours perfecting. pi pod aims to seamlessly run your pi in an isolated sandbox with minimal, carefully curated tooling to get out the way and give you the boring stuff you need.
pi pod is not just software, but it is a selective, small community. It is a community, because the goal is to ensure that all pi configurations feel seamless and unconstrained in pi pod, we need to work together to ensure we meet this objective. It is small, because I am offering pi pod on a hosted platform, where I want to ensure that each member gets a fantastic experience.
Of course, the entire project is open-source and designed to be extremely simple to self-host. Community membership not withstanding, I hope that anyone and everyone with an interest in pi will take a look at the repository and spin it up on their own. Self-hosting of course allows for true ownership and privacy, making this project yours to own and customize to your liking. Self-hosting also is a great option for businesses who want their entire agentic environment in their preferred data center.
The hosted version is offered to members of the community and is much more cost-effective than self-hosting in the cloud. If you would like to apply for membership, please fill out an application here. Hosted workstation pricing and trial terms are on the billing page; membership approval is required but not sufficient for a trial, and this site never starts checkout.
I hope that you will take a look at the project, make it your own, and even endeavor to improve upon it. This has been a labor of love for pi and working with agents. Feel free to reach out with any comments or feedback on the GitHub repository or by email at evan at pipod dot dev. I hope for engaging and fruitful discussion as we work together to put form to the continually changing art of software development.
- Evan