Pi Setup

Tauren uses Pi as its agent engine. The extension hosts Pi through the bundled SDK runtime instead of launching an external pi process for the main chat UI.

What Tauren owns

Tauren owns the VS Code-facing workflow:

• the sidebar UI,
• transcript rendering,
• session switching,
• session diffs,
• editor context,
• custom UI rendering for Pi extensions,
• workspace safety controls.

What Pi owns

Pi remains the source of truth for runtime behavior:

• provider authentication,
• model and thinking settings,
• session files and state,
• tool execution,
• skills, prompts, themes, and extensions,
• session tree operations.

Tauren caches some metadata for first paint, but live Pi state replaces that cache as soon as the runtime is available.

Authentication

Open Tauren settings and use the Login section to configure provider credentials. Depending on your Pi setup, Tauren may also pick up existing Pi configuration.

You can also use slash commands:

/login
/logout

Reloading Pi resources

After changing Pi skills, prompts, extensions, themes, or keybindings, reload runtime resources with:

/reload

or run Tauren: Reload Pi Engine from the Command Palette.

Optional Pi CLI setup

The Pi CLI is useful if you also want to use Pi from a terminal. Tauren's main sidebar does not depend on spawning pi --mode rpc, but a normal Pi installation can still be useful for shared configuration and troubleshooting.

Workspace directory

Tauren starts Pi with the first VS Code workspace folder as the runtime cwd. If you open the wrong folder, the agent may inspect or modify the wrong project. Open the intended workspace before starting new sessions.