Pi does seem special, at least to me. The only close to happy experience I have had coding with a small local model has been with Pi. Here is how I ran Pi and I was impressed how well it worked with a 9B model:

OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=16384 ollama launch pi --model qwen3.5:9b

To get close to a happy experience with Claude Code or OpenCode with small local models I had to use 28B to 32B local models.