Pi CLI Cheatsheet - earendil Terminal Multi-Model Coding Agent

Pi is a multi-model coding agent for the terminal. What separates it from single-model CLIs is that you can change model mid-session without losing context: explore cheaply and quickly, then switch to a stronger model for the step that actually ships, which saves waiting time more than tokens. This sheet is organised into install and authentication, interactive sessions, headless mode and scripting, and session and model management. Reach for it when you want to wire coding tasks into CI or a shell pipeline, in which case the headless group is the one to read - -p with --mode json emitting structured events is the script-friendly shape. If you only want to wander through files in the terminal while it explains things, the @ references and slash commands in the interactive group are enough. One judgement matters more than the rest: context cost. Every turn after that is billed on the full conversation, so compacting before a large change is far cheaper than recovering afterwards.