Compare Pi's native read tool to Amp's tool/MCP model
Session from pine-of-glass-sessions on Hugging Face by thomasmustier · MIT · condensed by Coders Talk
Click a segment to jump to that moment
6msession
0interventions
GOAL
Understand what Pi's built-in read tool does versus letting the model use bash directly, then compare against how Amp (a competing coding agent) handles images, tool discovery, and MCP.
- +0Prompt · +0What does Pi's native read tool do, and do we need it if models can just cat/head files like Amp allows?
- +0mAgent did · +0mRead Pi's README, docs, and read.js/read.d.ts source to explain what the built-in read tool does: line slicing, truncation limits, image attachment support, extension overrides.
- +2mPrompt · +2mWhat does the read tool do for images that plain bash doesn't?
- +2mAgent did · +2mExplained that read detects image MIME types and sends them as actual model image attachments, unlike bash which only surfaces text/bytes.
- +2mPrompt · +2mHow does Amp handle image files?
- +2mAgent did · +2mSearched web for Amp's docs and summarized that Amp treats images as user-attached context (paste or @-mention) rather than a read-tool fallback.
- +3mPrompt · +3mCheck the Amp docs post about Opus 4.8, and pull the Amp CLI code from npm/Sourcegraph to verify.
- +3mAgent did · +3mFetched Amp's news/manual pages, npm-packed the @ampcode/cli and darwin-arm64 binary, then ran `amp tools list/show` across modes to find that Amp dropped the text Read tool from smart mode but kept a separate view_media tool for images/PDF/audio/video.
- +5mPrompt · +5mHow does Amp do tool discovery / progressive disclosure / tool search, and what's the read_mcp_resource tool about?
- +5mAgent did · +5mSearched Amp's blog posts and a third-party writeup, then ran `amp tools show` on read_mcp_resource, skill, and read_web_page to conclude Amp replaced general tool search with skills as the discovery layer plus lazy-loaded MCP tools.
- +6mOutcome · +6mSession ended with a full comparison of Pi's read tool vs Amp's image handling and skills-based tool discovery, backed by inspected source and docs, no code changes made.
VERDICT
I'd start next time by directly asking to pull and diff the actual CLI source for both agents instead of starting with docs, since that's what actually settled the questions (unpacking the npm tarballs and running `amp tools show`). The npm-pack-and-inspect approach worked well for getting ground truth beyond marketing docs, and no real interventions were needed since this was pure research with no wrong turns to correct.