Socrates UK 2026 Workshop outcome - deterministic red/green widget for Pi

Experimental Pi.dev coding agent extension in .pi. It shows a persistent 'green' widget after tests pass, and a 'red' widget after they fail, so it is clear what state you are working in.

Aim was to make a small step in a developer-in-the-loop state machine that helps developers make small steps, whether an LLM generates the code or a person.

Hour long workshop in which we made a small extension to show the red or green status right above the developers' prompt. No tests, and specific to a typescript project, but works as a proof of concept.

We spent 4.5 $ cents in the session (My battery was not plugged in, so not running a local model) You can see the Session transcript for yourself. One context was enough for deepseek v4 flash it seems.

Possible next steps:

• Extract to separate extension.
• Put the compile and run test commands in a shell script, or environment variables (Pi can help you create a 'setting' that you can change in the menu, or pass in as environment variable before starting pi).
• Remember to run pi in a sandbox, there is no pretense of guardrails.

Thanks to all participants, it was nice to create a widget in small steps and iterate on my reasoning for how I use this stuff.

Willem van den Ende