WHAT I LEARNED BUILDING AN OPINIONATED AND MINIMAL CODING AGENT

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

This dev got frustrated with Claude Code constantly changing and adding features he didn't need, so he built his own minimal coding agent called “pi” with just 4 tools (read, write, edit, and bash) and a tiny system prompt under 1,000 tokens. He deliberately skipped everything that other agents have (no MCP servers, no permission prompts, and no plan modes). Despite being so simple, it scored competitively on Terminal-Bench, proving that less can actually be more at times.