pi-effort

Extension for pi: small command surface for reasoning effort and OpenAI/Codex fast mode.

Claude Fable reviewed 0.0.7 on 2026-08-15. See SECURITY.md.

Commands

Exactly two slash commands are exposed:

/effort {min|minimal|low|medium|high|xhigh|max}
/fast [on|off]

No /effort show, /effort default, /effort options, /effort fast, or /fast status. Bare /fast toggles the current fast-mode setting.

Effort

/effort accepts the current model's supported reasoning levels plus two adaptive aliases:

| Model type | min | max | Explicit levels | |---|---|---|---| | Non-reasoning | — | — | (thinking unavailable) | | Reasoning | minimal | high | minimal, low, medium, high | | xhigh-capable reasoning | minimal | xhigh | minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh |

Examples:

/effort min
/effort medium
/effort max

Fast mode

Fast mode is the latency/service-tier knob. When enabled, pi-effort adds service_tier: "priority" only for OpenAI, Codex, and Azure OpenAI requests whose model id starts with gpt-5. That tier is billed at a higher token price. The setting is global and persists until /fast off. A session that starts with it on prints a warning.

/effort calls Pi's setThinkingLevel. Pi saves that as defaultThinkingLevel for later sessions.

/fast      # toggle
/fast on   # force on
/fast off  # force off

Fast mode persists in ~/.pi/agent/settings.json under:

{
  "pi-effort": {
    "fastMode": true
  }
}

Footer status

For compact powerline footers, the extension publishes these status keys:

• pi-effort-thinking — think:<level>
• pi-effort-fast — fast only when fast mode is enabled and applies to the current model

Keyboard shortcut

Ctrl+Shift+E cycles through the current model's reasoning levels.

CLI flag

pi --effort max
pi --effort min
pi --effort high

The flag uses the same values as /effort.

Install

Requires Pi 0.84 or newer (@earendil-works/pi-coding-agent).

pi install npm:pi-effort

Until npm has the latest tag, install from git:

pi install git:github.com/ricardofrantz/pi-effort

Verify what Pi is loading:

pi list
npm list -g --depth=0 pi-effort

The durable Pi setting is the package entry in ~/.pi/agent/settings.json:

{
  "packages": [
    "npm:pi-effort"
  ]
}

Local development

For a one-off local test from this checkout:

npm install
pi -e ./index.ts

For a longer local-path development install:

pi remove npm:pi-effort
pi install "$(pwd)"

After publishing a new version, switch back to the npm package:

npm publish
pi remove "$(pwd)"
pi install npm:pi-effort

Verification

npm run check
npm test
npm pack --dry-run

Repo structure

index.ts        Pi extension entrypoint
effort.ts       Parsing, settings, and model capability logic
package.json    Package metadata and Pi manifest
tsconfig.json   TypeScript configuration

License

Apache-2.0