Delegate bounded coding tasks to Pi agent and review diffs

Lets an orchestrating agent hand a bounded coding task to the Pi coding agent CLI (pi) as a separate implementer, then review what it produced and land it itself. Pi has no sandbox and no permission modes whatsoever: a default headless run reads, writes, edits, and executes shell commands with zero prompts, so the only controls available are --read-only, which restricts pi's callable tools to read, grep, find, and ls across built-in, extension, and custom tools (installed extension code still runs with the user's host permissions even then), and the relay's own --no-approve default, which keeps project .pi settings, extensions, and skills untrusted until --approve is passed as an explicit opt-in for a repository the user actually trusts. Because there is no sandbox boundary to lean on, touchedFiles and the diff are the entire record of what changed and must be inspected after every single run.

Model selection uses pi --list-models to see what's available, then an explicit id or pattern such as <provider>/<model-id> or sonnet:high passed to --model; the relay forwards only letters, digits, and . _ : / -, so a glob pattern with * is rejected rather than silently passed through to a shell on Windows. Dispatch pipes the brief to pi --mode json on stdin and writes a structured result.json to a temp directory by default; the relay never commits. Pi auto-loads AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md context files from the workspace and its parent directories, so repo conventions reach it without being inlined into the brief. Rework resumes the most recent session (--resume-last) or a specific one (--session <id>) with just a delta brief.

Use it to delegate a bounded coding task to a separate pi implementer and then review its diff yourself, when the user explicitly asked for delegation to this implementer. Do NOT use it when: the task is small enough to do inline and delegation overhead isn't worth it; the pi CLI is not installed or authenticated; or the task needs a genuinely sandboxed implementer, since Pi has none at all - --read-only only narrows the tool surface, and a write-capable run always executes without prompts.

The brief states the goal, current state, what to change, what to leave untouched, the project's real gate commands, and a report contract telling pi not to commit. Dispatch:

node "<skill-dir>/scripts/relay.mjs" --brief brief.txt --cd /path/to/repo

Output is result.json with status (including pi_unavailable when the binary is missing), finalMessage (Pi's own report), and touchedFiles (the actual record of what changed, since no sandbox constrains it). A pre-run usage error exits 2 with no result file; a missing binary exits 127 but still writes status: pi_unavailable.

Wraps the Pi coding agent CLI (npm install -g @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent), authenticated with /login inside pi for a subscription provider or an API-key environment variable / pi's own auth file for an API-key provider. Can apply a fleet lane's provider/model dials from a companion delegate-setup configuration.

Orchestrating agents that need to delegate a scoped coding task to the Pi CLI and accept that no sandbox or permission mode exists at all - verification rests entirely on post-hoc review of touchedFiles and the diff. Adapted from the community amElnagdy/delegate-skills repository under the MIT license; this catalog entry is a docs-only import, since the executable scripts/relay.mjs is not bundled here.