Turn your Pi agent into a spec-obsessed senior architect

What it does gentle-pi layers a “senior architect and teacher” persona onto the Pi coding agent, steering it through a full spec-driven development lifecycle. It adds SDD/OpenSpec phase agents for everything from project onboarding through verification, orchestrates subagents under a single parent session, and demands recorded RED → GREEN → TRIANGULATE → REFACTOR test evidence when a project declares a test command. The package also guards reviewers by surfacing workload risk before a task balloons into an oversized PR, and it maintains a skill registry so the model does not silently forget to load project-specific capabilities.

The interesting bit The project treats agent chaos as a workflow problem, not a model problem. It installs a full bureaucratic layer—lazy SDD preflight, subagent orchestration, bounded native review, and reviewer workload guards—so Pi behaves more like a process-obsessed staff engineer than an eager intern with a shell.

Key highlights

• Enforces a full SDD/OpenSpec lifecycle with phase agents for init, explore, proposal, spec, design, tasks, apply, verify, sync, and archive.
• Orchestrates subagents under one responsible parent session, delegating context-heavy exploration while keeping risky changes inline.
• Demands strict TDD evidence—RED → GREEN → TRIANGULATE → REFACTOR—whenever the project config declares a test command.
• Surfaces reviewer workload risk before a task becomes an oversized PR, and bounds native review by freezing one candidate and dispatching only controller-selected lenses.
• Ships a verified, package-local runtime with SHA-256-pinned archives and Go SumDB-verified builds, rejecting PATH, global, or symlink fallbacks.

Caveats

• The current latest release track (v0.15.0 onward) is an unstable RDD development line; the last stable release without native RDD is v0.14.0.
• Windows runtime verification relies on Go SumDB and post-install tamper detection, not Authenticode, and explicitly excludes protection against a malicious joint binary-and-manifest replacement.
• Native review and some safety features require the package-local runtime; skipping the install with the override flag causes review operations to fail closed.

Verdict Worth exploring if you run Pi in production and need architectural oversight, spec discipline, and reviewable work units. Skip it if you prefer your agents fast, loose, and narrating their own homework.