Remember that Pi and Pi School are flexible systems
You can choose your own adventure. Paint outside the lines. Be silly. Be bossy.
- Want to cut to the chase? Say so: "Let's skip the long-winded descriptions and just get these changes made."
- Want to review your progress? Easy: "Let's revisit what we've covered so far in school."
- Want to do your lessons in another language? No problem: "Let's do everything in Spanish!"
Describe the goal
Talk about the what, not the how. The agent may come up with approaches that are simpler or more effective than the first idea you had in mind.
Keeping the conversation open to alternatives often leads to better outcomes. Describe what you are trying to accomplish, not only the exact tools or steps you expect.
Know when to give up and start over
Sometimes you end up in a rabbit hole: the agent makes a mistake, you try to correct it, and things get worse. This happens to everyone.
The important skill is knowing when to reset. Don't be afraid to run /new and start a fresh session with clearer instructions — or use /tree to jump back to before things went sideways, as covered in the Branching lesson.
Open a higher-level directory for broader access
Pi's built-in tools operate relative to the directory where you start it. If you've been working in ~/projects/foo, Pi can only see files in that folder.
If you want to make changes across multiple projects at once, start Pi from a higher-level directory like ~/projects instead. Pi will have access to every project inside it — useful for research, refactoring, or making sweeping changes across repos.
You can even start Pi from your entire home directory (~) to give it the broadest possible access. Since Pi has no built-in sandbox, only do this in directories you trust — see the Trust lesson for what project trust does and doesn't protect against.