Developer Caleb retires Claude Code for open source Pi
The gist
Developer Caleb retired Anthropic's Claude Code coding tool for open source Pi after 244 updates this year.
His complaints center on prompt bloat and broken multi-tab IDE tools.
How it unfolded
- Sep 21, 2026Caleb publishes "Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi," announcing he retired Claude Code as his main coding harness and moved his setup to Pi.
- Sep 21, 2026He writes that a day after his decision, Anthropic announced Claude Code would start supporting AGENTS.md files.
- Sep 21, 2026Caleb reports 244 releases to Claude Code this year, over three-quarters of which changed the system prompt or tool descriptions, and says the default Bash tool's description is almost 3,000 tokens.
Key terms
- open source
- Software whose source code is freely available for anyone to use, study, modify, and distribute.
- system prompt
- An initial instruction or context given to a generative AI model to guide its responses.
- tokens
- A machine learning model trained on huge amounts of text to generate, summarize, translate, and analyze language.
Source: Wikipedia