Your Pi agent's unpaid research intern

What it does

Pi Web Access is a TypeScript extension for the Pi coding agent that handles web search, page extraction, and video analysis. It exposes three main tools—web_search, fetch_content, and source_check—that let the agent query the internet, pull down readable pages or raw HTTP bodies, and verify claims against fetched sources. The extension supports a sprawling list of search providers and can clone GitHub repositories locally instead of scraping rendered HTML.

The interesting bit

The project treats provider redundancy as a first-class feature. Every capability carries a ranked fallback chain: if SearXNG fails, it tries OpenAI, then Exa, then Brave, then Parallel, TinyFish, and roughly a dozen others before giving up. For blocked pages it cycles through Firecrawl, Jina Reader, TinyFish, and more; for YouTube it can fall back from Gemini Web to Perplexity. It is essentially an elaborate router dressed up as an agent extension, and the dressing is what keeps Pi online when APIs flake.

Key highlights

• Zero-config search via Exa MCP works without API keys; OpenAI search can reuse existing Pi Codex auth.
• Handles YouTube videos and local screen recordings with frame extraction, transcripts, and visual descriptions via Gemini.
• GitHub URLs are cloned locally rather than scraped, giving the agent real file trees and contents (with a 350MB threshold before switching to API-based views).
• source_check returns structured verification artifacts with exact passage citations, SHA-256 hashes, and machine-readable claim status.
• Optional browser-cookie access for Gemini Web and self-hosted SearXNG support for privacy-minded users.

Caveats

• Tightly coupled to Pi agent v0.37.3 or newer; it is an extension, not a standalone library.
• Frame extraction for local or YouTube video relies on external ffmpeg and yt-dlp binaries that are not bundled.

Verdict

Worth installing if you already use Pi and want your agent to stop hallucinating about current APIs or library versions. If you are not in the Pi ecosystem, this is just a very long list of search providers you cannot use.