Pi

View as MarkdownOpen in Claude

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