pipal is a Persistent Agent Layer on top of the Pi coding agent

Why pipal?

I tried OpenClaw, loved the persistence and personality, but it was too much to fully understand, and that made me uneasy. Pi was the opposite: one agent, a set of tools, nothing more. I fell for the simplicity, missed the persistence, so I built pipal.

Ironically, I understand OpenClaw better now. But I'm good here :)

What is pipal?

A thin persistence layer on top of the Pi coding agent. It adds:

• identity, memory, and policy files for each agent
• topics that persist independently of the working directory
• native Pi sessions inside topics, with rolling summaries across chats
• human-owned AI teams with visible multi-agent conversation in Pi's TUI
• persistent direct agent messaging and outcome-owned delegation
• an optional local HTTP/WS server

Alpha / local-first: pipal is designed for one person on one trusted machine. It is not a multi-tenant platform and is not hardened for the public internet. Agents run with the host user's permissions and are currently unsandboxed; treat prompts, tools, workspace files, transcripts, and reports as local data. Provider calls may incur usage charges, and llm.json stores the selected provider/model in plaintext (never put API keys in it). Review provider privacy, retention, and billing before delegating sensitive work.

Largely prompted into existence and iterated through daily use.

What pipal is not

pipal is not a replacement for Pi. Models, providers, tools, and runtime behavior are Pi's job. pipal wraps around it.

If Pi breaks, pipal breaks. If Pi changes behavior, pipal follows. That's the deal.

Installation

Requires Pi coding agent 0.84.1 or newer and uv. Pipal follows Pi's current extension APIs rather than emulating them for older releases.

git clone https://github.com/mohammadbashiri/pipal
cd pipal
uv tool install .
pipal check-pi-compatibility

Quick Start

Make sure pi works first. Then create and chat with a pipal agent:

pipal agent create momo
pipal agent chat momo

Create a saved team from registered agents:

pipal team create product-team \
  --manager momo \
  --member researcher:Researcher \
  --member reviewer:Reviewer

Normal primary-agent chat is the default entrance. Address an agent directly, delegate an owned outcome, or use the saved team:

@agent:researcher inspect the dependency risks.

Momo, have the researcher investigate this issue, validate the result, and report back when it is resolved.

Have product-team evaluate this in parallel and give me one synthesis.

Use /watch <dg-id>, /join <dg-id>, and /detach to control visibility of background work. /brief <dg-id>, /review <dg-id>, and /audit <dg-id> provide durable executive, attributed decision-review, and full evidence-trace reports. Dedicated visible rooms remain available with pipal team chat product-team --topic planning.

See Pipal teams and persistent delegation for direct messaging, outcome-owned delegation, background jobs, durable reports, and the accountable primary-agent review flow. Delegation results are claims until the primary verifies them; /brief, /review, and /audit expose progressively more reporting detail.

Docker support is experimental; local installation is the supported alpha path. See Docker usage for isolation and networking caveats.

To learn what else pipal does, use --help or ask your agent to check out the repo.