Build with agentsAgent Harnesses

Pi

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Give Pi real-time web search, content extraction, and citation-backed research through the You.com agent skills. Pi is a minimal terminal coding harness from Earendil Inc. that uses skills—not MCP—for capability extension, so the same You.com skills that power Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex work in Pi too.

Install our docs MCP server

This documentation ships with a Docs MCP Server that gives any MCP-enabled agent a searchDocs tool to search every page here and get back relevant passages with source URLs—no API key required. Point your client at https://you.com/docs/_mcp/server. See the Docs MCP Server guide for setup and examples.

Quick Setup

1

Install the You.com Skills

From your Pi project root:

$npx skills add youdotcom-oss/agent-skills

This installs the full You.com skill set from github.com/youdotcom-oss/agent-skills. The skills follow the agentskills.io specification, which Pi reads natively—no Pi-specific package needed.

Only want one skill? Pin to a specific one:

$npx skills add youdotcom-oss/agent-skills --skill youdotcom-cli
2

Set Your API Key

The You.com skills read the YDC_API_KEY environment variable. Set it before launching Pi:

$export YDC_API_KEY="<YDC_API_KEY>"

Get a key at you.com/platform.

3

Start Pi

$pi
4

Try It

Inside a Pi session:

Search the web for the latest TypeScript 5.5 release notes and summarize the breaking changes.

Pi activates the relevant skill automatically when a task involves search or page extraction.

Keyless Tier

Want to try it without signing up? The you-search tool runs on a free tier (100 queries/day, no auth) when no API key is set—leave YDC_API_KEY unexported and Pi will fall back to the keyless endpoint. Page extraction and deep research require a key.

Quick Demo

Research the trade-offs between Pi's skill model and MCP for capability extension. Cite sources.
Extract the install methods from https://pi.dev/docs/latest and turn them into a checklist.

SDK users: OpenClaw

Building agents with an SDK rather than running them in a terminal harness? The same skills work with OpenClaw—see the agent-skills repo for SDK-side integration.

Troubleshooting

Install Pi from pi.dev and confirm with pi --version.

Confirm the skill files are present in your project. The npx skills add step writes them to disk. See pi.dev/docs/latest for Pi’s skill-discovery rules.

Confirm YDC_API_KEY is exported in the shell that launched Pi, not just in a sub-shell, and starts with YDC-.

Set YDC_API_KEY to lift the cap and unlock you-contents and you-research.

Resources

Agent Skills

Skill catalog, install commands, and usage examples.

SDKs & Tools Overview

Browse every You.com SDK, agent tool, and integration.