I switched a few months ago and have not looked back. Unfortunately Anthropic blocked access from Claude Subscription users today, but that's a different story.
So what makes Pi better than CC? Is it better than OpenCode?
My (oversimplified) summary: it's like vim versus an IDE. Good for tinkerers and obsessives who like small, sharp and customisable tools.
I'm not sure if this library or if the AI tool itself really matter all that much, but a lot of people seem to think that they do, or will anyways, which is probably why this post has no context. Because the author assumes that both the library and the tool are well known, but I think they're only well known by those in the AI world.
You know how it is. You only know what you know, and it's hard to remember what it was like when you didn't know. When you're around people who talk about the same things all the time, it's easy to just assume that's what's everyone's talking about.
There are so many of these little tools coming and going these days it's hard to keep track. Some of them might end up mattering, but most of them probably won't.
Pi itself is a minimalist coding harness with a tiny 1500 token system message and only read, edit and bash as tools. I only discovered it a few weeks ago and it is surprisingly powerful with a local Qwen3.5-35B - especially as it allows to keep the context low.
Mario's blog posts are not easily digestible (imho) until you have read a few of them but they have plenty of profound thinking. His blog is for me the first one in years where I have spent an hour to read several posts.
Mario is deeply rooted in the OSS system and basically that is what he is talking about here in this post. That said, I have no idea what earendil is doing, except that it is based on pi.
Edit: My personal take - "I've sold out" is very much Austrian style because actually it is the opposite. To quote one thing from the post:
"Then Miguel and Nat approached us. Long story short: we sold RoboVM to Xamarin. A short while later Xamarin closed-sourced our open-source RoboVM core, quickly followed by Xamarin selling to Microsoft. Then Microsoft shut down RoboVM immediately.
While there was some monetary gain, everything about this fucking sucked."
So Mario did a lot of vetting to hopefully avoid this from happening again.
I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.
For what it's worth, it's pretty straightforward to recreate it I found, at least it's base idea. Readline w/ nice output is a bit of a pain, but still, doable, and if you don't care about that part of it, then the overall agent loop that you'd build on top of? You could build it, I promise.
> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are basically well-meaning hippies in my book
I just want to retire in the Shire away from this AI non-sense (no jabs, just mild burnout).
You need hyper-obsessive nerds (the kind who were hyper-obsessive in school about D&D and LotR) to bring it to fruition.
The non-LotR namers give up early.
I contribute to open source projects, but none of them to date could support me buying much more than a beer. If one took off such that I could "live" off it, I would be happy to leave my current job and dive all in. Until then, I just keep plodding along.
But who am I to judge? If I made a project as popular as pi I'd sell out so fast.
If Mario had instead just written: "I'm excited to work on the future of PI at Palantir." and nothing else, clearly this is worse?
> The fact I can't understand what Earendil is
From the article:
> I learned a few things. My European brain thinks pi is just another small, mildly useful OSS project of mine with no commercial value. My peers in the space seem to think it has properties that make it stand out over the alternatives. VCs and big corps seem to think that pi has commercial value. Some demonstrated their conviction by sending term sheets or "dream job" offers.
Mario thinks there's no commercial value, but clearly some VC people do. If you have the VC money, but don't have any ideas for how to justify commercial viability, why bother? If someone just handed me a big bag of cash and told you to just "do something", I could imagine coming up with Earndil. Make a nice landing page, write some nice guiding principles, and figure out the AI stuff later.
This was a solid letter to the fans. I get why it’s disappointing to some, but it sounds like it was the right move for them personally. For people who’ve earned that kind of credibility, I say congrats on the move.
And if they mess it up, it’ll be easy enough to fork.
Tolkien stole the name from an Anglo Saxon poem, with a somewhat unclear meaning. His version of the story is woven through lots of his work, from the very earliest days. You could view all of Middle-earth as elaborating on his attempt to assign a meaning to it.
I have been working with pi-mono locally for a few months now. Great code base to study. Much higher quality than CC. (I have posted a gist analysis before.)
Will keep an eye on the work of these talented engineers and entrepreneurs. Good luck guys!
Ah haha so armin is also an Internet troll, right? For example if I said, one thing that sets the "Concorde apart from other commercial airliners, ..." I am saying the Concorde is a commercial airliner.
tbh. it sounds a bit like he himself was somewhat of an internet troll during that time
and it might not be quite the same definition of "internet troll" I tend to us
like it sounds a lot like a definition of "toll" like
- "very vocal, convicted of their opinion, non stop discussing(/neutral) potentially for the sake of discussing(/neutral)"
while I tend to associate more something like
- "intentional annoying, non stop discussing for the sake of annoying people, often using dishonest discussion techniques, potentially outright harassment"
> Colin is pretty OK for an ex-finance dude
Making it look like the author disapproves of finance dudes but finds Colin tolerable yet still within the expected parameters of badness.
easy to circumvent
but would fall under "circumventing security protections"/"hacking their API"/etc. And due to the sometimes very unreasonable laws the US has in that area they can use that to go after anyone providing a workaround.
Through that maybe won't work well for the EU, I'm not sure how much the laws have been undermined in recent years but we had laws which made it explicitly legal to circumvent DRM iff it's for the sake of producing compatibility (with some caveats).
you can figure out the fingerprinting today, but if they change it tomorrow and wait 5 months to force update everyone, they will catch you and ban
> Over coffee, Armin and I found we had more in common than we thought. Not only politically, but also in the way we think about software, and OSS specifically. In my recollection, we became actual friends that day, even if we didn't meet again for many years in real life.
This is probably the "highest value" part of that whole blog post, as this is something I see so frequently in the real world. People don't give others a chance to just be humans with conflicting views and opinions, and instead try to assign a label to the other part as quickly as possible, then they apply the same "rules of engagement" with that person, as anyone else who deserved to get that label. But once you forgo it, you realize how much you have in common even with your "worst enemies".
It goes both ways too, and the more closed up you are in that regard, others will treat you the same. But you miss out on so many interesting thoughts, ideas and conversations, when you limit yourself to labels and not realizing how diverse and interesting even the most "boring person" could be, given the right questions and the right conversation underlay.
In his head, it's the biggest selling pitch ever. No one can even begin to understand that your selling, what your product is...
Stop using llms you're all worse then crack addicts
> Earendil is a public benefit corporation
Ah, so like OpenAI then.
> But I've also learned what I do not want. I do not want to build my own company around pi. We have a four-year-old kid. I want to watch and help him grow up as best as I can. This is, first and foremost, what I want. Everything else is secondary to that. In the past 2 months, he cried a lot because "daddy isn't here". I never ever want to experience that again.
That's completely fair. And above it, you sketch exactly what you could've done instead to solve this:
> I mostly handed over the reins to a beautiful team of core contributors in 2016, who to this day keep the project well maintained. I never commercialized libGDX, unless you consider it commercialization to build a proprietary piece of software like Spine on top of it.
Sounds like the above worked great, and this would've been the obvious option to do once again.
> part of me wants to take this further. That includes building a team. It also includes commercialization to feed the team, done in a way that doesn't repeat the shit I lived through with RoboVM.
So this is the only part that really answers the "why" - you want to earn a living from working on Pi, and presumably (?) believe you can't achieve that with OSS. I think you're wrong, and belong to the 0.001% of OSS projects that can earn a very nice living from working on Pi without taking this step. I'm not exaggerating, I would fully agree that the number of OSS projects where this is possible is exceedingly small. But this is one of them. If you don't believe that then fair enough, I guess, though I'm curious why you believe that. Because there clearly exist a good number of OSS projects that make their lead developer a very comfortable living. Which condition do those projects satisfy that Pi doesn't?
If that's not it, then the article doesn't really answer the "why" despite lots of text that appears to do so.
You obviously owe me, or anyone really, nothing. So far all you've done is contribute for free. But if you're going to write this kind of article to clearly do a little bit of soul searching, assuaging fears and "make things public" to stop them weighing on your mind, then it looks better to go all the way and state things in plain terms.
Because he wants to have tons of money in the bank and get up every day to go do anything he wants with his four-year-old kid when he wakes up. Building something in a couple months that got popular enough to be able to this is amazing. Not check GitHub issues and PRs from ClawdBot5000 and hope he'll make some money from it in 5 years.
We're entering a new world of software development that allows people with no coding experience to do things like build their own mobile apps, websites, and all sorts of other things that were previously reserved for only technical people. The gap is closing quickly. At this point, if you're a "real" developer and have an app that somebody wants to purchase, you'd be crazy not to take the offer if it's a good amount and have cash in the bank that would allow you to do your own stuff in the future without worrying about $dayjob.
I know people hate LLM writing but at least it gets to the point and gives some background context. I have no idea what this guy is talking about. It's an article aimed at people who know him personally, it seems.
Just take the negative reactions, (if any) as warnings. They have seen it all before like you have:
+ VC funded
+ LoTR name (really?)
+ “We are not evil I promise”
And the biggest red flag:
> None of the early-stage investors are on my naughty list, quite the opposite.
For now.
Mario maintains the project pro bono, which is only possible because he had an exit a couple of years ago. I believe it is a lot of work making sure that the quality of the codebase doesn't detoriate with the onslaught of slop that is hitting open source projects right now.
Additionally, I have massive respect for Armin and I don't believe Earandil is your typical VC startup that wants to grow no matter what.
Well, perhaps they were right. Naturally when it comes to open source, people don't have any control over what others do with their own time. If they do not contribute financially (or their own time into improvement a project) then even less so. Still, it is a decision that has been made because of prioritising one's own personal goals. This is fine; but to expect that others share the same 1:1 opinion is not logical.
> Like me, he thinks open-source and open protocols are a necessity, not just lipstick on a corporate pig.
I think the description is also painting lipstick on a pig. I've seen too many who promote open source but then sell out suddenly. Github? And what is the influence Shopify is doing in the ruby ecosystem? But anyway, that is all their own personal thing. To assume any community needs to share those personal success stories ... it makes no sense.
> Earendil's products are built on top of pi.
Ok, so ... that is lipstick. Aka promo. I don't understand why he critisizes others but then does the same himself. Which is fine; I just don't get the assessment he is doing.
> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies.
Here he refers to Palantir clearly. Thiel is abusing Tolkien IMO. Or he sees himself as Sauron or whatever. But he is more a clown Sauron, just like his mad orange king is.
> who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around.
Does AI serve humans? Or does it serve those who control it?
> Finally, and most importantly to me, almost everyone on the team has kids.
So what? I mean, many people who are not so well in the head, had kids. I am not saying that refers to the blog author here, mind you - I refer to the "my criterium is that all have kids". Pity on those fools who don't have kids then?
> pi is owned by Earendil, the company.
Ultimately people will derive value from it, or not; but it is clearly a private project. Even if open source, we can see that with chrome + Google. Google makes most decisions. Yes, you can build on top of it; I use thorium right now, for instance. But I am not fooled one second who effectively controls a project here.
Best luck of success to him.
Lol, the attitude. 180 degrees from the community that gave him everything he has. Classic.
I run a tiny thing that a lot of people like. Its licence is permissive: if I 'sold out', nobody who is using it today would have to change a damned thing.
And you know what? Call me if you wanna buy it. Because here's my priority list:
1. Looking after my family.
2. Looking after yours.
There's nothing wrong with making money, I'm 100% all-in on capitalism.
It's just the sudden change in attitude, particularly when people jump to the polar opposite they've preached their whole lives. Some say it's wise to change your mind, I just find it repulsive.