pi-helper-desk

Helper Desk for pi: the agent's plan draws as a purple progress bar above the prompt — dot, title, a gradient of blocks that fills as steps finish, a Tasks 2/4 pill and a percent, with the step in progress shimmering mid-gradient on a dim line underneath. /helpers opens the desk in the Claude mod's side-pane style: the plan as a checklist, one π pet card per subagent (a pixel π mascot in one of 8 hues — red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, purple, pink — that hops and blinks while its subagent runs and stands still when done) under colored group headings (green Running, yellow Finished, red Stopped), and a live feed of the chat's tool calls in their kind colors. Ported from the Helper Desk mod for Claude Code.

Part of the coedit monorepo.

How it works

Helper Desk registers a plan tool whose prompt guidelines ride on the tool itself: call plan first for any task with 2 or more steps, send the whole list every time a step finishes, and mark the last step completed before the final answer. If the agent still works without a plan, the first tool result of the run carries a one-line nudge.

The plan lives in the plan tool's result details and is rebuilt from the session branch, so forking or /tree lands on the right plan automatically. A finished plan holds at 100% for 20 seconds, then the bar goes away until the next plan. If a subagent extension such as @tintinweb/pi-subagents is installed, each Agent launch gets its own pet card: it appears under Running the moment the call starts, moves to Finished (✓) or Stopped (✗) when the result lands, and never shares a hue with another running subagent.

Install

pi install npm:pi-helper-desk      # once published
pi install ./packages/pi-helper-desk   # from a checkout

Usage

• Just work: when the agent plans, the bar appears above the prompt and moves.
• /helpers — open the pane: the plan checklist plus the last tool calls as a live step feed. Escape closes.

Development

npm run build && pi -e ./packages/pi-helper-desk   # one-shot run
npm run check                                       # registry, typecheck, tests