Daily workflow

Count what’s on the table. You installed Pi and shipped a first fix with nothing but four default tools and a compact system prompt. You opened that prompt up and watched every tool call, every token, every dollar go by. You wrote stash’s conventions into .pi/APPEND_SYSTEM.md so you stopped re-explaining them, and learned when to fork a session instead of dragging a wrong turn forward. You split cheap grunt work from careful work across .pi/settings.json and models.json, and found the honest ceiling on local models. You built your first extension - a /stash command, a real tool - and then rebuilt, on purpose, the guardrails Pi ships without: a damage-control gate, a task discipline gate, a PLAN.md habit, a status line. You packaged an onboarding procedure as a skill your teammates can install. You designed child Pi processes to fan a big re-extraction job out in parallel, and a verifier that reads the builder’s session log instead of trusting its word. And you sketched a small orchestrator-lead-worker team for a migration that was too big for one context.

None of that was a detour. It was the harness - and stash got better at every step because the harness did too.

This module doesn’t add an eleventh piece. It does two things instead. First, it pulls the nine pieces you already have into a single setup you could hand to a teammate and say “this is how I work stash” - not a bigger harness, just a coherent one. Second, it asks the question you’ve earned the right to answer now that you’ve built the thing by hand: where does Pi actually win, where does it cost you, and is it the tool you reach for first or the one you keep in reserve?

• Assemble the harness - walk .pi/ for stash end to end: the rules, the routing, the extensions, the gates, the verify loop, all in the same project, all pulling the same weight.
• When to reach for Pi - the honest verdict: where the minimal core wins, where it quietly becomes your job, and whether it’s your primary tool or your second one.
• Close the course - look back at the whole week on stash, and return to the question this course opened with.

Start by walking the assembled harness.