here is a typical bench run with 9 runs and traces for opencode, pi and smol
you can look at every step and which tools are used and how
https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/
sh is pretty versatile and composes well
pi also only has 4 tools (good!)
I mean, you can't be serious, right? Think about the unintentional commentary you're making here.
You're saying it can be understood in an afternoon but it is intentionally obfuscated.
It might as well be proprietary code, but if it is proprietary code, you're actually making fun of all the coding agents for being a walking security nightmare, because in the end all they do is run bash and no amount of sandboxing or regexes will make bash secure.
So why not drop the pretenses and just expose the coding harnesses for what they are? Inscrutable bash executors that have the potential to go out of control.
I'm confident you can understand what it does (and does not do) and why in an afternoon
(probably in 20-30 minutes actually, even if you are not familiar with Go)
the same is way more difficult with larger agent implementations even if you only want to understand the direct implementation ignoring all the 3rd party dependencies that come with them
no need to start from smol (even though I think it makes a decent starting point)