OpenClaw - the agentic software spreading like wildfire - was built on top of Pi, a minimalist, self-modifying agent. I sat down with Pi's creator, @badlogicgames and longtime Pi user (+ the creator of Flask) @mitsuhiko to talk Pi, and their (very grounded!) takes on building with AI. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 07:30 How Mario, Armin, and Peter Steinberger met 15:15 How 30 dev teams use AI agents: learnings 21:50 The importance of judgment 24:26 Challenges when non-engineers write code 28:30 Downsides of over-automation 32:18 Pi 48:09 OpenClaw + Pi 50:54 “Clankers” 57:32 Open source and AI 1:00:22 Complexity as the enemy 1:02:50 Building an AI-native startup 1:11:52 “Slow the F down” 1:16:40 MCPs vs. CLI 1:25:03 Predictions and staying up to date • YouTube: youtu.be/n5f51gtuGHE • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1fDw9c… • Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bui… Brought to you by: • @statsig  – ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. statsig.com/pragmatic • @SonarSource  — The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for code verification and automated code review. Try it out for yourself. sonarsource.com/plans-and-pric… • @WorkOS  – WorkOS gives you APIs to ship enterprise features – SSO, directory sync, RBAC, audit logs – in days, not months. Visit WorkOS.com to learn more. --- Three parts I found especially interesting in this discussion: 1. New trend: AI makes it harder for senior engineers to reject pointless complexity. Historically, senior engineers kept software complexity at bay simply by saying “no” a lot. But Armin observes that these days, more junior engineers and product managers deploy agent-scripted counterarguments when a senior colleague kicks an idea to the curb. This makes decision-making exhausting, and more bad ideas make it into production as a result. 2. It should be MUCH easier to build specialized tools for specific tasks. Different projects need different harness types because, as Mario points out, the same hammer is not ideal for every single construction job. As such, Pi is built with the goal of allowing the creation of specialized harnesses. It can modify itself so that a user can create the bespoke harness needed for any task. Mario believes it’s a preview of how self-modifiable software might look in the future. 3. Automation bias is one of the biggest risks of working with AI agents. Once devs confirm that an AI agent can produce acceptable code, they start to review its output less often, even though agents can – and do! – produce slop. Mario advises being far more sceptical with agents, and cautions that the quality of their output isn’t guaranteed, however well they performed previously.