Thanks to being unemployed, the last few months I've been experimenting a lot with coding agents, harnesses and most importantly, the workflows around them.

Currently I'm refining what I think works best for me, which I'd call something like "issues/PR based LLM workflow", powered mainly by this action I'm building on top of the Pi coding agent SDK: https://github.com/shaftoe/pi-coding-agent-action

Essentially I issue prompts swapping between the terminal and the git forge web app (GitHub and my own Forgejo instance) and it currently looks something like this:

- create an issue with detail/quality of spec based on how the task or the project is important

- trigger a Pi session prepending a comment in the forge with "/pi " to work on it, either to produce a report or to e.g. implement the change in a new PR

- trigger more sessions in the same thread, be it an issue or a PR, to steer or to add more requests like fork out a new PR or similar. This works also for reviews so I just add comments and the submit a review with "/pi follow the comments instructions" or similar

- if I want more fine graded control and I am at the workstation I use the bridging Pi extension to pick up the work locally: https://github.com/shaftoe/pi-coding-agent-action/tree/devel...

- rinse and repeat until I'm either happy with the change or the PR is so bloated that I get rid of it and start anew

I know it's probably something Claude / Codex / Cursor offer with their web app but I want the freedom and the flexibility to use the LL provider/model I want, and Pi as a harness does that plus all the rests egregiously. Another advantage is that I can fit the LLM action in any pipeline I want and take care of chores like automated changelog generation and what not.

As I said it's still mostly work in progress but in general I think there's lot of potential with this kind of workflow, it forces me to keep the scope of the changes small (I still want to review the PR content after all) and gives me a memory for free just leveraging the ticketing system. I also like the fact the harness is running most of the time in the ci/cd sandbox which, in the case of Forgejo, I control fully.

PS I try to keep my work with/on AI tools on my website at https://a.l3x.in/ai