I originally was just messing with pi-autoresearch. Gave it a sample task to build the most portable coding agent.First cut was 6 KB of shell. Great for one-shots, unusable interactively. I was shocked it actually worked.Started building up -- adding features — but with a self-imposed rule: no new dependencies, and sub 500 LOC. This thing had to be truly portable. Just sh, curl, awk. System primitives only.Which means I did some genuinely disgusting things in awk, including JSON parsing and the OpenAI Responses tool loop with reasoning items carried across turns.It's now ~400 lines. In the box: Anthropic + OpenAI, 7 tools (bash, read, write, edit, grep, find, ls), REPL, auto-compaction, checkpoint/resume, pipe mode, 90 no-API tests. Not in the box: TUI, streaming, images, OAuth, Windows, dignity.Two honest things:1. I stole/modified the system prompt and the architecture. Pi/Claude/Codex wrote the awk. I cannot read most of this code. This wasn't possible for me a year ago.2. Heavily i...