Add You.com to Pi (Earendil)

Give Pi real-time web search, content extraction, and citation-backed research through the You.com agent skills. Pi is a minimal terminal coding harness from Earendil Inc. that uses skills — not MCP — for capability extension, so the same You.com skills that power Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex work in Pi too.

Quick setup

Install the You.com skills

From your Pi project root:

$ npx skills add youdotcom-oss/agent-skills

This installs the full You.com skill set from github.com/youdotcom-oss/agent-skills. The skills follow the agentskills.io specification, which Pi reads natively — no Pi-specific package needed.

Only want one skill? Pin to a specific one:

$ npx skills add youdotcom-oss/agent-skills --skill youdotcom-cli

Set your API key

The You.com skills read the api_key environment variable. Set it before launching Pi:

$ export api_key="YDC-YOUR-API-KEY"

Get a key at you.com/platform.

Start Pi

$ pi

Try it

Inside a Pi session:

Search the web for the latest TypeScript 5.5 release notes and summarize the breaking changes.

Pi activates the relevant skill automatically when a task involves search or page extraction.

Keyless tier

Want to try it without signing up? The you-search tool runs on a free tier (100 queries/day, no auth) when no API key is set — leave api_key unexported and Pi will fall back to the keyless endpoint. Page extraction and deep research require a key.

Quick demo

Research the trade-offs between Pi's skill model and MCP for capability extension. Cite sources.

Extract the install methods from https://pi.dev/docs/latest and turn them into a checklist.

SDK users: OpenClaw

Building agents with an SDK rather than running them in a terminal harness? The same skills work with OpenClaw — see the agent-skills repo for SDK-side integration.

Troubleshooting

pi: command not found — install Pi from pi.dev and confirm with pi --version.
Skill doesn’t activate — confirm the skill files are present in your project (the npx skills add step writes them to disk). See pi.dev/docs/latest for Pi’s skill-discovery rules.
401 errors — confirm api_key is exported in the shell that launched Pi (not just in a sub-shell) and starts with YDC-.
Hit the keyless rate limit — set an api_key to lift the cap and unlock you-contents and you-research.