The Positive Effects of Friction in Automated Development; or, Pi Is Bad

Introduction I have recently tried the AI harness Pi . I'm coming from it from a harness that I first picked up when all this stuff was sort of newer called Goose. I can see what all the hype is about, but I actually had a bit of a "better is worse" experience with it. I think I'll be sticking with Goose for now. I have come to the conclusion that it is because of the friction Goose introduces into the system makes it better. In the rest of this blog post, I describe the differences in my experience running Pi versus Goose using Open Router's deepseek-v4-flash model. Goose configuration that I used may be found here. Pi global configuration may be found here. Goose project-level wrapper may be found here. Pi project-level configuration may be found here. Experiment Design I type a short three-to-four sentence prompt into Goose and it just works. Sometimes I would need to provide guidance, but once I get it going, I can often step away from my desk and come back. I often heard…