If someone has never used Pi, what's a good starting point where someone took Pi and started adding some extensions etc to get to that minimal-but-useful-and-productive-for-coding state? Is there such recipe/writeup?
You can just fire it up and ask it to suggest some, or look on the site at the most downloaded and see which sound useful to you. That's basically what I did. I also put in some work to containerize it and do some manual/automatic checks to lock down extensions a bit, but that's just me.
It really doesn't take much for it to be useful, maybe something to search the web?
If you want you can just tell it to write you extensions too, like one to wrap curl so it can get to the web easier for instance. Or just tell it to use curl, really up to you. Just an example to point out: like, do whatever, it's very flexible.
It is genuinely useful on its own. I have enjoyed discovering the things I want and adding them bit by bit.
I'm doing quite well with just a "todos" extension, and a "plan" prompt template (doesn't enforce read only tool usage, but prompts to build todos and discuss before doing anything).
I will probably try out some subagent systems soon, but I'm doing surprisingly well without them.
It's already in that minimal but useful state so you can just start and ask it to write code.
If you want a more tricked out "starter pack" there's oh-my-pi or lazypi and maybe a few others. But worth being careful what you install because 1. A full pack of extensions can destroy the minimalism of pi 2. Random extentions are a security nightmare.