pi-recap

Never scroll back to remember what you were doing.

An always-visible session recap panel for pi coding agent showing the current goal and last few conversation turns with live streaming updates.

Banner and screenshot images created with pi-banana.

Features

• Auto-derived session goal — the title updates automatically after the first turn using a fast LLM
• Turn history — last 4 recaps with timestamps, speaker tags (you / pi), and fade-to-dim for older entries
• Live streaming — breathing dot while thinking, caret blink during token arrival, 180ms settle animation on completion
• Keyboard navigation — Ctrl+Shift+R to focus, ↑↓ to scroll older entries, Esc to release
• Slash commands — /goal to override the title, /recap-model to pick the summarization model, /recap-blacklist to manage the model skip-list
• Theme-agnostic text colors — recap headline and body use hardcoded high-contrast colors that work on any theme (light or dark)
• Cheap summarization — auto-selects the fastest/cheapest available model (flash/mini/haiku/turbo) to keep costs near zero. Curated chain and blacklist seed are imported from pi-bench, the source of truth for bench data.

Installation

Pi auto-discovers extensions from ~/.pi/agent/extensions/. Clone the repo there:

git clone https://github.com/fornace/pi-recap.git ~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-recap
cd ~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-recap
npm install

Restart pi. The recap panel appears above the editor after your first message.

Usage

The panel is passive — it just shows the last few turns. No configuration needed.

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+Shift+R	Focus the recap panel
↑ / ↓	Navigate older entries (while focused)
Esc	Release focus

Slash commands

Type /recap for the interactive menu. No arguments needed — everything is selection-based.

Menu path	Description
/recap → goal: ...	Set/override the session goal (text input)
/recap → clear goal	Remove override, return to auto-derivation
/recap → model: ...	Pick from available fast models (select list)
/recap → clear model	Remove model override
/recap → blacklist: N entries → view / add / remove / reset / re-seed	Manage the model skip-list

Architecture

pi-recap/
├── index.ts           # Extension entry point (hooks, slash commands, state management)
├── state/
│   ├── state.ts       # HistoryEntry type, speaker enum
│   ├── store.ts       # In-memory state + persistence (session branch entries)
│   ├── replay.ts      # Restore state from session entries on restart
│   └── blacklist.ts   # Persistent model skip-list
├── subagent/
│   ├── recap.ts       # User & agent recap generation (streams from cheap model)
│   ├── goal.ts        # Session goal derivation (streams from cheap model)
│   └── picker.ts      # Model selection chain: override → cache → curated → ctx.model
├── ui/
│   ├── status-widget.ts  # TUI component (rendered above editor)
│   └── anim.ts        # Animation primitives (streaming dot, settle sweep, color utilities)
└── util/
    ├── date.ts        # Timestamp formatting ("now", "14m", "14:30")
    └── log.ts         # Best-effort debug logging

Model picker chain

The summarization model is selected through a 4-layer chain (top wins):

1. User override — set via /recap-model <id>
2. Cached winner — 24h TTL from last successful run
3. Curated chain — fast/cheap models imported from pi-bench, ordered by bench rank
4. Session model — pi's configured model (sacred fallback, never blacklisted)

Development

cd ~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-recap
npm install        # types + typescript
npx tsc            # type-check (no emit, jiti loads .ts directly)

Pi loads .ts files via jiti — no build step needed during development.

Testing

npx tsx test-recap.ts            # test recap/goal generation with mock registry
npx tsx test-recap-models.ts     # test model picker chain against real registry

License

MIT

From the same author

By Francesco Frapporti at Fornace.

• pi-bench — LLM benchmark toolkit for pi. Probes every model to find the fastest and cheapest. This extension uses pi-bench data to pick summarization models.
• pi-banana — Generate and edit images inside pi using Google Nano Banana. The banner and screenshot images above were created with pi-banana.
• pi-alibaba-models — Complete Alibaba provider for pi: Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax with native thinking levels.
• pi-notte-theme — Notte: a true-dark pi theme where darkness has color and text glows like terminal phosphor.

Changelog

0.8.16

• Fixed double-render of the recap panel during pi-tui startup. The widget now registers on first user input (before_agent_start) instead of session_start, preventing the panel from appearing twice when pi first launches.
• Added raw Enter keypress listener via onTerminalInput to bump the decoy row at the earliest possible moment, before pi processes the submit. This gives maximum time for the decoy to clear orphaned border fragments in scrollback. The listener skips when the recap widget has focus and never consumes the keypress.