Headless Pi

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0100

A CI job needs to run a review over a diff. A pre-commit hook needs to summarise what just changed. Neither has a person, and neither wants a terminal.

pi already handles this, and the handling is almost entirely documented in one place: cli-integration.md. But the interesting question is not “how do I print the answer” — it is what is different when the agent has no person attached, because most of what you built in the previous twenty-nine chapters assumed one.

RPC

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0100

You want to drive Pi from an editor plugin, from a Python service, or from an IDE — without reimplementing the TypeScript SDK in another language or running Pi inside your host process. A subprocess gives the host a separate failure and lifecycle boundary. It does not sandbox the agent: Pi and its tools can still reach whatever files, credentials, and services the child process is permitted to access.

RPC is the fourth interface in this progression and the one that keeps the isolation. This chapter is about the protocol: what flows in each direction, how you correlate, and the subprotocol that almost nobody realises exists.

Automation on AIBussin — AI applications, systems and books

Headless Pi

RPC