Pi Durable and multi-agent team collaboration: what the runtime solves, and what is still missing
What Pi Durable is
Pi Durable is an experimental package that Earendil shipped with Pi 1.0 on October 1, 2026. Earendil describes it as a harness built for long-running, durable and malleable agents that can run anywhere (source: Earendil's announcement).
A harness here means storage plus the machinery to run one or more model conversations: it provides the tools the model calls and the execution environments those tools run in. The Pi coding agent is driven by one person in a terminal; Pi Durable does not replace it, and is a framework for building any agentic application.
It ships memory, SQLite and JSONL storage, and you can implement the small storage interface on something like Postgres. On Cloudflare, the Agents SDK provides PiHarness, which runs Pi Durable inside a Durable Object (source: Cloudflare Agents docs).
Four problems it solves
The process dies, the run continues
Every step of a run is a task that stores a checkpoint before moving on. A new process opens the same storage and continues each unfinished task. An interrupted tool call reruns only if it is marked safe to rerun; otherwise the model is told it was interrupted. A requestId makes a submission exactly-once.
Many conversations at once, with forks
One harness runs as many conversations as you need, concurrently, without one blocking another. A conversation can fork another at any point and sees the parent's history up to that point without copying it.
Application state is committed with the transcript
State such as a todo list, a plan or a ticket lives in documents: typed JSON changed in the same atomic commits as the transcript, so the state never disagrees with the conversation that produced it.
Several people watch and steer the same conversation
Any number of clients can attach to a conversation. Each gets the current view first and then only the changes, and any client can steer a running conversation or queue a follow-up.
What team collaboration still needs
Pi Durable makes one agent run reliably for a long time. On a real team, though, each person brings their own agent: one uses Claude Code, another Codex, on different machines and clients. The question is no longer only whether several people can steer one conversation, but whether these separate agents can share one set of facts and pick up each other's results.
Approval is the other gap. Cloudflare's documentation states that Pi Durable has no approval or permission step for tool calls yet (source: Cloudflare Agents docs). Earendil's announcement shows how to build one with a hook: ask in Slack before a deploy and store the answer in a memo so a restart does not ask again. Approval is something developers build on top of the framework.
| Layer | What it solves | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Runtime | How one agent runs for a long time, recovers from crashes and is steered by several people | Pi Durable |
| Connection protocol | How agents reach external tools and data in one standard way | MCP (Model Context Protocol) |
| Team facts | How different people's agents share facts a human has confirmed, hand work to each other and continue it | Ontoloop |
How Ontoloop works today
Ontoloop sits in the third layer. Each person's Claude Code, Codex or WorkBuddy connects to one team space over MCP. Decisions, tasks and other facts an agent writes start as proposals; once the agent's owner or a space admin confirms them they become team facts, and other agents can find, cite and build on them.
Ontoloop does not use Pi Durable today: connected agents run in their own clients, and the built-in Ontoloop assistant runs on our servers. Our roadmap is to give every member a cloud computer where agents run for a long time and resume after interruptions. We plan to base that runtime on Pi Durable; it is in early research and not available yet.
Frequently asked questions
How does Pi Durable relate to the Pi coding agent?
The Pi coding agent is a terminal tool driven by one person. Pi Durable is a separate experimental package shipped with Pi 1.0 for building long-running agent applications that several people can steer. They share code such as pi-ai, and Pi Durable does not replace the coding agent.
Does Pi Durable include approvals?
Not yet. Cloudflare's documentation states that Pi Durable has no approval or permission step for tool calls yet; developers build one with hooks.
Does Ontoloop use Pi Durable?
No. Ontoloop does not use Pi Durable today; agents connect over MCP. Pi Durable is the planned base for our cloud agent runtime, which is in early research and not available yet.