Mario Zechner
pi’s author, known online as badlogic https://x.com/badlogicgames, previously the libGDX author, and since 2026-04-08 a member of earendil holding the pi decisions with armin-ronacher and Colin Daymond Hanna https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/. He framed the acquisition plainly: “I’ve sold out,” and pi is now owned by the company while he remains in charge of it. His 2025-11-30 post on building an opinionated minimal coding agent is the design record https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent, and his November 2025 position that developers do not need MCP https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-02-what-if-you-dont-need-mcp/ was reversed by the Pi 1.0 MCP support in October 2026, an about-face he acknowledged https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026-10-02/pi-coding-agent-pulls-a-180-and-adds-mcp-support/5300678.
IndyDevDan’s “Mario and Armin, the creators and maintainers” gives the pairing that carries the durable-agents story. Zechner wrote the harness, Ronacher’s Earendil is building the company around durable agents on it. The Vienna School of Agentic Coding is Zechner’s own name for the loose circle (VibeTunnel, pi, cross-commentary) https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/. See 2026-10-12-youtube-indydevdan-pi-durable.
Sources
- “I’ve sold out”, 2026-04-08: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/
- “What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent”, 2025-11-30: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent
- GitHub: https://github.com/badlogic