“I used pi as the base harness”
Why do people keep using bad tools with ai?
What's bad about it and what's a better one?
AFAIK pi's approach is to be quite minimal and allow extensions for customization, making it a more flexible solution, but you need to do work to make it fit your use case. OP mentions one extension, but perhaps it'd have benefited from more.
Another choice would be opencode which has more functionality and is a more heavyweight option out of the box.