It absolutely doesn't. It must be the extensions you're using.

I've found is that nearly every extension on the official pi.dev/packages is vibe coded trash, like for example the most popular subagents extension.

Instead of just giving you a basic subagent, it's a whole kitchen sink of recursion, teams, chains, confusingly named agents like "oracle" etc. Basically feels like someone kept prompting "what else could we add here?".

They're all like that. It's no wonder these slow down pi.

What I've done is just have the agent write my own.

Get a local copy of e.g. that kitchen sink subagents extension. Have the agent list all the features, then I give back a much smaller list of the features I want and say "write me a new extension with just these new features" and every time it one shots it (using GPT 5.3 usually), then 20-30 minutes later I have a working, lightweight extension tuned to my exact workflow.

I've done this for I guess about 8 extensions now (subagents, a lightweight typescript LSP, web search, background processes, Claude style hooks, plan mode are the main ones) and it's very fast and snappy.