You said no MCP

uwagar

so much MCPs in the FTA yet not a line about what MCP actually is.

_fw

I appreciate their reluctance towards MCP, but /something/ is better than nothing. It’s suboptimal for the reasons the author outlines: but so is USB-C. So is NVME, so is HDMI. We use these hugely successful technologies in spite of their flaws because they’re widely compatible and easy for the end user. That’s why MCP is everywhere. It might not be performant, robust and uniform but it WILL get better over time. And I’d much rather have the broad MCP ecosystem that we have now than seven or eight different “optimal” ways of plugging in an LLM to something useful.

mi_lk

The post mixes Codemode and MCP yet the explanation is strange IMO and both appear to be new things in the latest release If you are a Pi user it may be better to just ask your agent to explain https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/pull/10040

ppsreejith

Anyone found a good file upload solution for MCP? Or is the best practice to use HTTP to upload files outside MCP?

wren6991

> And while we could have just wired up the metadata to enable better MCP extensions, we also think that MCP with Codemode solves quite a few of the issues that it traditionally had. There's just something that bothers me about this. Normally if LLMs want to compose multiple operations, they have the perfect tool for this: bash, or whatever other OS shell is available. It's why I was always confused by Codemode-type constructs for direct chaining of tool calls; see also the way highly-RL'd modern models will fall back to sed or python for complex file edits. It seems like Codemode is raised here as the perfect tool for chaining or composing MCPs, but isn't that backwards? LLMs are already given the perfect tool for that, and the problem is that MCPs aren't exposed to that tool.

OleksandrC

Honestly, the provided argument for it is rather weak. They are basically adding a way of running scripts that are contained within harness to execute harness's own tools (that's the Codemode). A coding agent can already compose any arbitrary logic by invoking shell scripts (or python scripts, or node scripts), etc - so this is just entirely unnecessary in the core, from my perspective. If you feel that Pi has been drifting away from its original vision, try hax ( https://usehax.dev/ ) - you might like it.

blamestross

As far as I can tell MCP is just "we bothered to document our api in a programatically readable way". Just generate CLI tools, with docs, from MCP servers on demand.

carlsborg

This is somewhat similar to HuggingFace smolagents where the model writes code that calls tools, instead of emiting json to describe the tool call per turn. Here Codemode is one tool that the model calls when it needs to compose many tool calls, especially MCP ones. Is what i understand of this.

KronisLV

I feel the same way about needing support for sub-agents, those feel pretty foundational to me. I suspect that a smart model driving multiple dumber models for work and then using sub-agents with the same smart model for adversarial review will be a pretty common pattern. Personally, I got a bit confused about Pi having most of that stuff as plugins since I remember how much of a mess Eclipse was where so much was just loosely fitting together plugins and just went with OpenCode since it covers most of my needs out of the box. Guess that might also be a sign of me getting older, because my IDEs and desktop environments are all closer to stock too.

Sha1rholder

An article pretending to address its title, but just beating around the bush.

NichoPaolucci

I had no idea pi didn't support MCP! I'm a new user, I just started messing around with it. I was getting my tooling up and running and tried to get one of my database MCPs working (Which, in retrospect, seemed a little painful - but I guess I was under the assumption that it was my responsibility to build + maintain those connections). Another retrospect note, "No MCP" appears to be the first icon on their front page - not sure how I missed that. Imagine my surprise reading this!

croes

> The first thing to remember is that the world is not static And you didn’t remember that when you said no to MCP? No, no MCP for now?

aussieguy1234

Generally, I use skills with a CLI tool instead of MCP and tools. Usually in most cases I also get a coding agent to generate the CLI tool. I find this approach is easier to debug and I can also use the tool myself to ensure it's working well.

melodyogonna

Good. I too I'm not a fan of MCPs, but these days I do find them useful. In Claude Code I connected to my company's MCP which made Claude Code infinitely more useful for everyday work stuff

Phemist

So Pi is also accruing cruft now :(

raincole

I'm still confused about what this codemode is. Models have been trained to chain bash and other typical unix tools well. They're so good at that to an uncanny level. Why do we want to not utilize this ability? Is it just a permission management issue in case you don't want the model to use shell directly?

zmmmmm

the conversation seems to dwell on things you could substitute Bash for but the real need stems from completely opaque systems that nothing can reach but which are now getting MCP support. This is where being left out of having MCP support will hurt. I'm still quite happy to let all the harnesses compose bash commands to their hearts content (inside their sandboxes ...)

agentdev001

As many others have commented: good, I too am an mcp hater. However- in my testing, mcp is really quite fast, and its pretty much free at this point- with frontier models. Context rot is, from what ive tested, not as much of a concern now. I genuinely was not able to hillclimb skills/extensions to beat out the speed of mcp in some cases I've been testing.

magnio

I'm a bit bumped when I first saw pi is moving from bash to codemode and also adding MCP, since I thought that loses the purity and simplicity of the "use bash for everything" philosophy. However, after reading more about it, I realized codemode is just a slightly enhanced version of bash: more complex, sure, but likely more robust, secure, and efficient. For those who, like me, don't get the point of this change, here is how I understand it. The first tool execution runtime in harnesses are direct tool calls with JSON or XML, such as the Read and Edit tools. As an escape hatch, we have Bash tool that allows arbitrary code execution on the host running the agent. The downsides of using bash (on the host) as the main tool execution runtime are: - Syntax and obvious errors only surface at runtime - Unergonomic orchestration of parallel and background tasks - Verbose command output cluttering context - Dependent on the host environment, packages versions, etc. - No security measures by default. To me the last point is the biggest inherent weakness, usually mitigated by creating a dedicated unprivileged user or running bash in a sandbox. Note that direct tool calling is kind of the polar opposite on these points: syntax errors are caught early, orchestration can be done with some wrapping tools, command output is controlled, and most importantly they are more sandboxed. On the flip side, they obviously have way less power, necessitating Bash tool in the first place. Codemode is the middle ground between these two extremes. It actually can be derived simply by one idea: what if we replace Bash by another language that can be checked for obvious errors, i.e. type checked? Everything else falls out from there: - Any language would do, but I think TypeScript fits the balance between safety, speed, conciseness, and popularity in training data. - If we use TypeScript, might as well run it in a sandbox as JS runtimes have been designed with this in mind for 20 years - Orchestration comes for free from the JS runtime. It's not more powerful, just more ergonomic. - Since the tools are controlled by the harness and not dependent on the host, cloud agent becomes easier. - With this in place, MCP are not very different from a tool provided to this sandboxed runtime. Overall I find the benefits compelling enough, but we'll see if the heavily-RLed models these days will use it effectively.

praveenvijayan

The core idea of Codemode that I understood is - The script doesn't actually write any code itself; rather, it acts as a workflow automation and program management tool. It pulls data from an issue tracker, delegates the analysis to a model, and synthesizes the results to help manage Pi's development priorities. Codemode isn't replacing MCP; it's fixing MCP's biggest flaw—its lack of composability.