@pify/autopilot

Let the main pi agent keep going on its own between turns — opt-in, hard-capped, and never over your head. Arm it toward a goal and it drives the next turn itself until the work is done, the cap is hit, or it stops making progress.

Part of the Pify suite. Install with pify install autopilot or pi install npm:@pify/autopilot.

Why

The suite already loop-guards child agents (@pify/subagent, @pify/swarm), but the primary session still stops after every turn and waits for you. For a well-scoped task you'd rather set it going and step away. Autopilot does that — carefully.

Safety first

An unbounded self-driving agent is the dangerous kind, so every default is a brake:

• Off by default. It does nothing until you arm it with /autopilot on.
• A hard turn cap it can never exceed, even via settings (ceiling 200).
• A no-progress breaker — the same guard @pify/subagent uses — stops it the moment it repeats itself instead of working.
• Never over your head. While a dialog is open (an ask_question, a confirm), it waits rather than driving a turn. And the agent can hand a decision back to you: it ends a reply with <autopilot-blocked>, states what it needs, and autopilot stops with "needs your input".
• A clean finish. The agent ends its reply with <autopilot-done> when the task is complete, and autopilot stops. Both tokens are matched only on the reply's last line, so the agent restating the instruction mid-plan does not end the run early.
• Stops on a failed turn. pi runs its own retry loop first (transient 429s/529s and the like); once those are exhausted and a turn ends on an error, autopilot stops with the error rather than re-driving a dead provider to the cap.
• Always visible. A 🅰 autopilot N/max footer while armed, and a notification with the reason every time it stops.

It drives each turn on agent_settled (fully idle) via a triggered message, so it never talks over a running turn. Arming is interactive-only, so a headless pi -p run never self-drives.

Use

/autopilot on refactor auth.ts to use the new session API and make the tests pass
/autopilot status        # armed? turns used, goal
/autopilot off           # stop now

Give a goal (recommended) and it works toward that, one concrete step per turn; without one it just continues the current task. It stops on any of: the done signal (<autopilot-done> on the last line), the blocked signal (<autopilot-blocked> — the agent needs your input), the turn cap, no progress, a turn that fails after pi's own retries, or /autopilot off.

A /reload re-instantiates the extension, so it silently disarms autopilot — re-arm with /autopilot on afterwards. A /new, /resume or fork disarms it with a notification.

With @pify/goal: both self-drive the idle agent, so arm only one at a time — running both just means the turn gets nudged twice. Pick autopilot for "keep going until done" or goal for its evidence-gated, budgeted completion.

Settings

.pi/autopilot.json (project) or <agentDir>/autopilot.json (global):

{
  "maxTurns": 10,
  "maxUnchangedTurns": 3
}

maxTurns (1–200) is the hard cap per arming; maxUnchangedTurns (2–10) is how many turns with no real progress count as stuck. PIFY_AUTOPILOT_MAX_TURNS overrides the cap for one run. Bad values fall back to the defaults with a warning.

License

MIT © Pify maintainers