little-coder

About little-coder

The research story behind all this — why scaffold–model fit matters, how a 9.7 B Qwen beat frontier entries on Aider Polyglot, and what the load-bearing mechanisms actually do — is written up on Substack: *Honey, I Shrunk the Coding Agent*. Start there if you want the "why"; stay here for the "how".

pi is the minimal substrate — agent loop, multi-provider API, TUI, session tree, compaction, extension model. Four built-in tools (read / write / edit / bash) and a ~1000-token system prompt.

little-coder is pi + 20 extensions + 30 skill markdown files + a Python benchmark harness. It doesn't fork pi or shadow its CLI — pi is a plain dependency in package.json, and everything little-coder-specific lives under .pi/extensions/, skills/, and benchmarks/. The launcher runs pi with --no-extensions and wires in exactly the bundled set, so you add your own extension by dropping a directory into .pi/extensions/ (or passing little-coder -e /path/to/ext/index.ts at launch) and remove one of…

From the project's README

little-coder is an open-source project written primarily in TypeScript, with 2.6k stars on GitHub. It was last updated in September 2026.