Set up Pi in Earkeep

Two things on your device, and Settings → Agents checks for both:

• Pi, installed, with a provider configured. The sections below walk through it.
• Node.js 20 or newer, which brings npm and npx with it. Earkeep starts Pi through an adapter fetched with npx, so without Node the CLI can be installed and signed in and the agent still cannot run.

If you don't have Node yet, install it with Homebrew or from nodejs.org:

Then check that both answer, and that the first says 20 or higher:

Earkeep does not install agents. It runs the one you already have.

Or through a Node package manager, if you already manage tools that way:

Check it landed with pi --version. The Pi site is the reference for the other routes and for configuring a provider.

Pi is a harness rather than a model, and it supports a long list of providers. Run it once in a terminal and configure the one you want to use before trying it from Earkeep.

If it wants an API key, set it in your shell profile rather than in a single terminal window. Earkeep launches agents through your login shell precisely so that the environment they get matches the one your terminal gets, and an export that only exists in one open window is not part of that.

Earkeep never stores or reads those credentials. They belong to Pi and to your shell.

1. Open Earkeep and press Settings, at the bottom of the left rail.
2. Go to Agents.
3. The Pi card should show a green Ready with its version number. A yellow Needs setup lists underneath what is still missing, and a red Not installed means Earkeep could not find the CLI.

Pi speaks no protocol of its own, so Earkeep starts it through the pi-acp adapter, the same shape as the adapters that wrap Claude Code and Codex:

So this agent needs Node installed as well as Pi itself. If Node is missing or older than 20, the card turns yellow and says which version to install. The adapter is what an editor would use too; nothing about it is specific to Earkeep.

1. Open a saved meeting.
2. In the agent panel, start a New session and pick Pi and a working directory.
3. Type what you want, or start from one of the suggestion cards, which come from your own prompts in Settings → Templates.

Your other meetings come wired in. Earkeep offers its own MCP server to the session automatically, so the agent can search and read your saved meetings without you configuring anything.

"Not installed", but it works in your terminal. Almost always the path. Earkeep probes through your login shell, so open a fresh terminal window and run pi --version: if that fails too, the install did not finish wiring itself in.

"Needs setup", asking for Node.js. Install Node.js 20 or newer, or update the one you have (brew upgrade node). The adapter that gives Pi a protocol to speak is fetched with npx.

The session starts and then ends. Run npx -y pi-acp in a terminal on its own. If it exits there, Pi has no provider configured yet.

Use a custom agent instead. This is the general answer whenever a tool moves faster than the built-in roster. Add custom agent in Settings → Agents takes any command that speaks the Agent Client Protocol, including an adapter you installed yourself, and it behaves exactly like a built-in once added.

• Agents and MCP: why Earkeep integrates with a protocol rather than with ten separate agents.
• All Earkeep how-tos.