The main ones missed immediately were web access/search. Then the to-do list features (it was a nice surprise to try OpenCode and see this working immediately.). There were a couple of other niggles but it was a few months ago. Also, this may not be common, but it seemed to struggle to edit effectively (driven by Qwen 3.6 35b/27b) and often rewrote whole files instead.
Gotcha, I feel like model or provider-specific installs would be a nice QoL improvement in that case. Presumably, part of this issue (beyond the ethos of minimalism) is the aim of shipping shipping an agnostic toolset. For myself, im openai-first, and of course that pushes me to favor their hosted tools (in this case web search), and their native CPT/RL'd stuff (Ie apply-patch).
Though, imo, the fact that pi maintains its "we only include the bare minimum!" statement is part of the draw for me. Especially considering that im in an enterprise env; being able to internally share custom implementations of out-of-the-box Codex/CC stuff is really nice.
I do wonder how they'd go about shipping a default web search tool. Big problem there is the lethal trifecta. Shipping something that arbitrarily allows untrusted content to be retrieved non-deterministically I'm sure is a long conversation on Pi's end. Pushing it off to the user to decide is easy.
I know it's against the ethos of Pi, but I think a lot of people would consider a handful of things like a memory system, web search, subagents, and looping to be a basic/base thing they would add to every agent harness.
I use Pi and love it, but the base install is extremely minimal (a handful of tools, no subagents, etc.). That’s on purpose. Sure, you can add more with packages, but that’s not the base install.