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agents.cli

Models & config

Your .pi/APPEND_SYSTEM.md means you’ve stopped re-explaining stash’s conventions every session - that problem is solved. But watch what happens the next time a backlog chore lands: a few hundred saved URLs from before the readability fix need re-extracting, one HTTP fetch and one parse each, nothing to think about. Pi runs it on whatever model you’ve been using for everything else, at whatever reasoning depth you left the dial. If that’s the same frontier model you want reasoning carefully about the extractor’s site-specific quirks, you just paid careful-reasoning prices for four hundred rounds of “fetch, strip tags, save.” Multiply that by every mechanical chore stash generates and the bill stops looking like rounding error.

This module is about noticing that model choice and reasoning depth are dials, not defaults - and about finding exactly where Pi lets you turn them.

Where this module goes

Section titled “Where this module goes”
  • Find the files first. Before you can route anything you need to know which config actually wins when you’ve got both a global setup and a project one. Two files, one merge walks ~/.pi/agent/settings.json against .pi/settings.json, plus the sibling files - models.json, auth.json, trust.json - that config splits across.
  • Turn the dials on purpose. Pi actually gives you two independent levers - which model answers, and how hard it thinks before it does - and stash’s lumpy workload is exactly what makes misusing them expensive. Route the cheap work to the cheap model sets both, per task, instead of pinning one setting and paying it on everything.
  • Take a model off the meter entirely. Not every stash chore needs a hosted model at all. Run a model on your own machine is the honest version of that idea - what it buys you, and where it quietly runs out of room.

None of this is exotic. It’s the same instinct the last three modules kept returning to - spend on purpose, not by habit - aimed at the two things that actually cost money: which model picks up the work, and how long it’s allowed to think about it.

Start with the config files.