Pi Boss is an open-source multi-agent orchestration extension developed by skyfallsin for the pi terminal coding agent ecosystem. It provides orchestration capabilities that allow a primary pi agent to decompose tasks and delegate work across multiple sub-agents running simultaneously in tmux.
Tmux-based Sub-agent Spawning — Splits terminal windows and spawns dedicated, visible pi instances in separate tmux panes. - Automated Boss Mode — Injects system instructions that parse high-level user tasks into independent, parallelized subtasks. - Visual Pane Highlighting — Colors tmux panes dynamically (e.g., green for completed, red for attention) to broadcast task states. - Sub-agent Lifecycle Management — Exposes explicit programmatic commands (create, list, highlight, kill) to monitor and manage running instances. - Continuous Supervisory Loop — Executes an automated monitoring cycle where the orchestrator periodically peeks at pane outputs, steers behavior, or terminates stalled sub-agents.
Use cases
Use Case: Parallel Bug Fixing and Test Generation A developer can instruct the primary agent to fix an authentication bug while simultaneously generating regression test suites. Pi Boss breaks the task into separate jobs and spawns an agent for src/login.ts alongside an agent writing API tests in a separate tmux split.
Use Case: Multi-Directory Repository Refactoring When refactoring across multiple packages in a monorepo, Pi Boss can spawn isolated pi instances set to specific working directories (cwd). Each pane runs independently with isolated context, allowing the orchestrator to track status without context-window pollution.
Use Case: Visual Monitoring of Long-Running Agent Tasks Engineers who want visual visibility over multi-agent workflows can watch sub-agent execution directly in tmux. The orchestrator changes pane highlight colors to red or green, alerting the user immediately if human intervention is required.
Who it is for
Pi Boss is designed for developers already using the pi CLI coding agent who work inside tmux and want local, parallel sub-agent workflows. It is not suitable for developers seeking GUI-based IDE extensions or those running terminal environments without tmux support.
Install guide
Installation Clone the repository and install the extension into your pi configuration: bash git clone https://github.com/skyfallsin/pi-boss.git cd pi-boss npm install Link or place the extension inside your local pi extensions directory according to your pi-mono configuration.
First Run Ensure tmux is running before launching pi: bash # Start a tmux session tmux new -s dev # Launch pi with the extension active pi
Example Session Trigger orchestration using the Boss Mode directive: text > boss mode: refactor the user controller and write unit tests for the endpoints The primary agent will split the current tmux window, spawn two child pi agents with tailored prompts, color-code the panes during execution, and report back once all subtasks complete.
amux — amux is an open-source agent harness and session multiplexer developed by Mixpeek. Built in Rust, it is designed to manage,…
Open Interpreter — Open Interpreter is an open-source terminal coding agent maintained by Killian Lucas and the Open Interpreter community. It is designed…
SWE-agent — SWE-agent is an open-source autonomous software engineering agent harness built and maintained by researchers from Princeton University and Stanford University.…
Claude Squad — Claude Squad is an open-source terminal user interface (TUI) orchestrator and multi-instance session harness for Claude coding agents, developed by…
Crush — Crush is an open-source terminal coding agent created by Charm (Charmbracelet), the team behind popular Go terminal UI libraries like…
Gemini CLI — Gemini CLI is an open-source terminal coding agent maintained under the Google Gemini organization (google-gemini/gemini-cli). It provides a command-line and…