Pi subagent extensions: TintinWeb, NicoBailon and Taskplane

The biggest advantage of pi over other coding agents is its extensions. Pi doesn't come with subagents, plan mode, or MCP. It gives you the primitives to build what you need. If you don't want to build it yourself, install a third-party package and you're done.

I have several custom extensions in my pcaropi repo, but here I'm comparing three different approaches for delegating work to subagents — which is one of the most useful things when working with pi on real projects.

The three options¶

	TintinWeb	NicoBailon	Taskplane (HenryLach)
Paradigm	Single subagents, Claude Code style	Generic orchestration (single/chain/parallel)	Batch orchestration with waves, lanes, and DAG
Install	pi install npm:@tintinweb/pi-subagents	pi install npm:pi-subagents	pi install npm:taskplane
Built-in agents	3 (Explore, Plan, general-purpose)	8 (scout, researcher, planner, worker, reviewer…)	4 (supervisor, task-worker, task-reviewer, task-merger)
Chains / Parallel	❌	✅ Sequences + fan-out/fan-in	✅ Waves with parallel lanes via DAG
Git worktrees	✅ Basic	✅ Advanced	✅ Core of the system
Web Dashboard	❌	❌	✅ Live dashboard with SSE
Maturity	Early (0.6.3)	Mature (0.24.0)	Initial release

TintinWeb — Subagents, Claude Code style¶

@tintinweb/pi-subagents replicates the Claude Code model: Agent, get_subagent_result, and steer_subagent tools. Few agents (Explore, Plan, general-purpose), but highly polished UX: animated widget, interactive conversation viewer, mid-run steering to redirect running agents.

Its most unique features: persistent memory across sessions (project/local/user) and an RPC event bus so other extensions can spawn subagents.

Great if you're coming from Claude Code and want something familiar.

NicoBailon — The full orchestrator¶

NicoBailon's pi-subagents is the most mature of the three (0.24.0, 20K lines of TypeScript). A single subagent tool with single, chain, and parallel modes. Comes with 8 built-in agents, 6 predefined prompt templates, and a preview TUI to edit steps before launching.

Things I like: cascading model fallback (if a model fails on quota, it tries the next one), agent packages with namespacing, and pi-intercom integration for child→parent communication.

This is the one I use day to day. Flexible, battle-tested, well documented.

Taskplane — Batch orchestration¶

Taskplane by HenryLach is a different beast. It's not a generic subagent framework — it's a batch task orchestration system. Tasks are defined in PROMPT.md + STATUS.md files with steps, dependencies, and checkboxes. A DAG organizes tasks into waves, each wave runs lanes in parallel with isolated worktrees, and a merge agent integrates everything at the end.

It has impressive features: a live web dashboard with SSE, multi-step workers that keep context between steps, automatic inline reviews, and auto-recovery that retries crashed workers. It even supports polyrepo with cross-repo dependencies.

For projects where you have a batch of well-defined features with dependencies, it's unbeatable.

Which one to use?¶

• Delegate individual tasks with a clean UX → TintinWeb
• Flexible orchestration with chains, parallel, and templates → NicoBailon
• Run a batch of features with dependencies and automatic reviews → Taskplane

All three install with a single pi install npm:.... TintinWeb and NicoBailon can coexist since they use differently named tools. Taskplane has its own paradigm and shouldn't conflict with either.

More pi extensions and configs in my pcaropi repo.

Fuente original: pi.dev