This is cool! There were a few rust attempts I played around with last year, but they all seemed to fizzle out in favor of everything running on top of js or python.
I know that Google just launched a go version a couple months ago, but I haven't really spent any time with it, because well, gemini isn't really useful to me right now.
The thing I constantly ran into with using non-platform (ie. claude code or codex) agents is that even though their tool call API seems flexible, they've finetuned these "agentic" models around their specific agents. Opus is the worst I've seen about this. It really wants to use specific bash tools and if you restrict or hide it, it'll start writing python code to call into bash to do it.
Generally, the models seem to adapt really well. I am using GPT models in hax a lot, and they have no trouble whatsoever using hax tools instead of their "native" codex tools.
Also since hax tools are just "read", "edit", "write", "bash" and "task_wait", it would be expected that the models would use one-off scripts to achieve their goals (either shell scripts, or python scripts, etc).
Note to be confused with Haxe: https://haxe.org/
Would love to hear more about the decision to create the terminal in C? Also what did you use to record your demo video? It looks awesome!
The main reason to use C is that it's the easiest way to achieve minimal resource footprint. Also it's the language I know really well already.
The demo was recorded with asciinema.
This is cool! There were a few rust attempts I played around with last year, but they all seemed to fizzle out in favor of everything running on top of js or python.
I know that Google just launched a go version a couple months ago, but I haven't really spent any time with it, because well, gemini isn't really useful to me right now.
The thing I constantly ran into with using non-platform (ie. claude code or codex) agents is that even though their tool call API seems flexible, they've finetuned these "agentic" models around their specific agents. Opus is the worst I've seen about this. It really wants to use specific bash tools and if you restrict or hide it, it'll start writing python code to call into bash to do it.
Generally, the models seem to adapt really well. I am using GPT models in hax a lot, and they have no trouble whatsoever using hax tools instead of their "native" codex tools.
Also since hax tools are just "read", "edit", "write", "bash" and "task_wait", it would be expected that the models would use one-off scripts to achieve their goals (either shell scripts, or python scripts, etc).
A minimalist, terminal-native coding agent written in C is such a clean approach to lightweight local tooling. Love the tech stack choice.
If it's minimalist and written in C why does it have such specific system requirements?
Probably because of the 'minimalist' qualifier.
I don't understand why anyone would still start a new software project in C today, given the long track record of mistakes developers can make in it.
Because C is the best.
I just built and installed this harness on my MacBook Pro and am very happy with its clean, fast performance with local models and llama.cpp.
Well done, Oleksandr!
Nice work! Thank you for sharing it.