agent-pi

Agent Pi

Generic, domain-agnostic Pi CLI runner. Receives a task from the agent pipeline, spawns the pi CLI (from @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent) with configurable tools and instructions, and returns a structured JSON result.

New agents are created by swapping instructions (agent AGENTS.md guardrails) and ALLOWED_TOOLS — no Go code changes needed.

How It Works

1. Agent pipeline ([[task/controller]] → Kafka → [[task/executor]]) spawns a K8s Job with the agent-pi image.
2. The Job receives TASK_CONTENT, TASK_ID, BRANCH, ALLOWED_TOOLS, MODEL, PHASE, etc. via env vars.
3. main.go assembles the prompt via lib/pi (embedded workflow.md + output-format.md + task content).
4. Runs pi --print --mode json with the allowed tools and selected model — adding --no-session unless the agent is a service agent, whose sessions must persist (see below).
5. Parses the JSON result and publishes to Kafka via lib/delivery.KafkaResultDeliverer (when TASK_ID set), or falls back to NoopResultDeliverer for local runs.

Service Agents

A Config with spec.type: service is a long-running identity rather than a task runner: the executor stamps AGENT_TYPE=service, and the binary then stays alive instead of running one task and exiting. It serves three endpoints on LISTEN (default :9090):

/prompt is what makes the shape addressable, and it is the seam a chat transport would use. Its body is the prompt and its response is the runner's result; the handler itself persists nothing. Session continuity belongs to the runner, via PiRunnerConfig.PersistSession, which is on for a service agent and off for a task-routed one — a task-routed agent's runs are unrelated tasks sharing one volume, so resuming one task's conversation inside another would be a defect rather than a feature.

The endpoint is unauthenticated and reachable only from inside the namespace (there is no Ingress). The request body is bounded at 1 MiB, and the prompt is never logged — only its length and a short digest.

Env Vars

Pi's own config (auth state, sessions) lives in $HOME/.pi. The K8s manifest mounts a PVC at /home/pi/.pi; locally pi resolves it from your home dir. There is no CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR equivalent — pi does not have OAuth, it uses MINIMAX_API_KEY.

Creating a New Agent

To add a domain-specific agent that reuses this binary:

1. Create a task file in the OpenClaw vault with assignee: pi-agent (or a new assignee routed to this image via a Config CRD).
2. Mount a PVC or Secret containing the domain-specific AGENTS.md guardrails and any API credentials.
3. Set ALLOWED_TOOLS on the Config CRD to the minimum tools the agent needs.
4. Set ENV_CONTEXT to inject domain context (e.g. API URLs) into the prompt without modifying the binary.

Config CRD env pattern

The Config CRD's spec.env map becomes pod env vars, which main.go consumes via struct tags. Example from k8s/agent-pi.yaml:

spec:
  env:
    ALLOWED_TOOLS: Read,Bash,Grep,Glob,Write,Edit
    MODEL: MiniMax-M2.7-highspeed

Tune ALLOWED_TOOLS per task shape (minimum viable set):

Prefer constrained Bash(path:*) forms over bare Bash to minimize shell attack surface.

Pi subprocess env allowlist

lib/pi/pi-runner.go strips pod env down to a safe allowlist (HOME,PATH,USER,TZ,… plus known provider API keys: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY, MINIMAX_API_KEY, GEMINI_API_KEY, PROVIDER_API_KEY, …) before spawning pi. Custom env vars beyond that list must be threaded explicitly via PiRunnerConfig.Env map[string]string in main.go. Don't expect arbitrary pod env to reach pi by default.

Local Quick Test

cd ~/Documents/workspaces/agent/agent/pi
go run . \
  --task-content "$(cat /path/to/task.md)" \
  --model MiniMax-M2.7-highspeed \
  --allowed-tools "Read,Write,Edit,Bash,Grep,Glob" \
  --agent-dir agent \
  --branch dev

Skips K8s, task controller, task executor, git writeback. Useful for iterating on prompts.

For a file-based local run (reads the task from disk, writes the result back), see cmd/run-task/.

Links

Admin endpoints:

• Dev: https://dev.quant.benjamin-borbe.de/admin/agent-pi/setloglevel/3
• Prod: https://prod.quant.benjamin-borbe.de/admin/agent-pi/setloglevel/3

Related

• pkg/prompts/ — embedded prompts (workflow.md, output-format.md)
• agent/AGENTS.md — default agent guardrails
• lib/pi/ — shared prompt assembly + pi CLI invocation
• lib/delivery/ — shared Kafka result publishing
• task/controller/ — Obsidian→Kafka event source
• task/executor/ — Kafka→K8s Job spawner

License

This project is licensed under the BSD-style license. See the LICENSE file for details.