--- schema: 1 type: video title: Building pi in a World of Slop — Mario Zechner description: >- 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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/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-pi-coding-agent 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 --- canonical: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/RjfbvDXpFls' markdown: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/RjfbvDXpFls.md' llms: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/RjfbvDXpFls/llms.txt' parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T15:26:12.143Z' language: null children: [] videoId: RjfbvDXpFls durationSeconds: 1105 publishedAt: '2026-04-16T22:58:06.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 48 endSeconds: 124 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/RjfbvDXpFls?t=48' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 124 endSeconds: 134 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/RjfbvDXpFls?t=124' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 134 endSeconds: 289 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/RjfbvDXpFls?t=134' heldReason: rights - 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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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/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-pi-coding-agent 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 --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/watch/RjfbvDXpFls · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.