Alternatives
Products that do what A tiny (480 LOC) AI coding assistant for your shell does
Hi HN. This is a script I have been using for some time for coding tasks, which I have polished a bit and published. The motivation behind this script was to have an agent with persistent session which I can use from the shell like a regular command. It _can_ also be scripted, although I don't use it in such a way. The script uses a minimal prompt, which just tells it to use standard unix tools to do everything. I was surprised at how well it worked, when using a good model. Qwen3-coder is on openrouter, and it works well with the minimal instructions. I also tested qwen2.5-coder with ollama…
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Hello everyone. I've been working on this experimental editor called Huzzah. I've been working almost exclusively with coding agents since January of this year, and over the past few months I began to feel utterly exhausted by them. They're great, but I'm finding it more and more tedious to write full sentences for every change I want. Not only that, but it seems there's a complexity limit for codebases - beyond a certain point the agent begins confusing itself. I'd like to go back to writing code, but I don't want to go all the way back to fully manual coding. So I've come up with this…
17d ago · danielvaughn.dev
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I originally was just messing with pi-autoresearch. Gave it a sample task to build the most portable coding agent. First cut was 6 KB of shell. Great for one-shots, unusable interactively. I was shocked it actually worked. Started building up -- adding features — but with a self-imposed rule: no new dependencies, and sub 500 LOC. This thing had to be truly portable. Just sh, curl, awk. System primitives only. Which means I did some genuinely disgusting things in awk, including JSON parsing and the OpenAI Responses tool loop with reasoning items carried across turns. It's now ~400 lines. In…
Apr 2026 · pu.dev
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I got tired of coding agents that feel like IDEs in disguise. Slow to start, full of chrome, opinionated about where you work. So I built one that doesn't get in the way. It's called *mini-coder*. The command is `mc`. Tagline: Small. Fast. Gets out of your way. Oh — and it mostly wrote itself (with some help from me). --- ## What it is mini-coder is a terminal-native AI coding agent built on *Bun.js* — fast startup, native TypeScript, built-in SQLite, no ceremony. It routes to *Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Ollama, and Zen* and auto-detects your provider from env vars. No config file to write.…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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2023 · github.com
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Hello all, I'm a software developer. Over the last few months more and more of my work has turned into using coding agents instead of typing the whole code myself. Usually a few claude sessions at once, sometimes codex, one per feature or per revealed bug. I ran them in a split terminal for a few weeks, and quickly spotted two main problems. The first is that I couldn't easily tell which agent was stuck waiting on me and which was still working, so I'd cycle through sessions and checking on them. The second one: agents sharing a single branch step on each other. Two of them could be editing…
Jul 2026 · shikigami.dev
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Since I mostly work within the terminal, I wanted an AI coding assistant that integrates seamlessly with it. Something I could call from SSH, integrate into scripts or just invoke quickly without leaving the shell. Most existing tools (at the time) were either closed, required various dependencies, or tied to a specific vendor. I wanted a free, open-source alternative that: - installs with a single binary (useful on bare servers) - talks to any LLM endpoint and especially self-hosted open weight model - could run headless, composable, and Unix-like SHAI stands for SHell AI! Along the way I…
Oct 2025 · github.com
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Aug 2026 · github.com
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I vibe-coded a terminal tool called Pluqqy (I had a dormant domain on hand) to help me keep LLM context organized while coding with AI. It’s my first time writing Go and my first terminal app, built almost entirely with Claude Code. • What it does: Pluqqy lets you manage prompts, rules, and context as small building blocks, then stitch them together into a single file (like AGENT.md or CLAUDE.md) that your coding agent can consume. It’s meant to reduce context drift and make iteration easier. • Why I built it: I was losing track of my agent context between sessions and wanted something…
Oct 2025 · github.com
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We were both genuinely impressed by Claude Code after it helped each of us fix nasty CI problems overnight. Doing those fixes manually would have taken days. After that experience, we each found ourselves struggling through Ctrl+Tab through multiple Claude Code windows in our terminals. While we enjoyed having agents working for us in parallel, context switching and cycling through each terminal tab was a real pain. So we thought: Can we design a TUI dashboard that manages a large swarm of agents in one place? Even better, can agents manage agents hierarchically, like how companies work?…
May 2026 · omar.tech
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Hi HN, I just released a very simple AI Shell / CLI tool that lets you convert natural language directly into executable shell commands. Built with python to simplify terminal workflows and help you quickly run commands without memorizing syntax. It has two main usage modes: One-shot mode: Quickly execute commands using natural language. Example: ai "find all PNG files larger than 5MB" The AI responds with the appropriate command and asks if you want to execute it. Interactive chat mode: Start a terminal chat session with the AI (ai -i) to iteratively build commands or scripts. Some…
2025 · github.com
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Hey everyone! For the past two weeks my friend and I have been heads-down building Cloi, a fully local debugging agent that runs right in your terminal. You probably know the drill—every AI coding tool asks for API keys, subscriptions, and uploads your entire codebase to the cloud. Cloi does none of that: it runs entirely on your machine, with no cloud, no API keys, no subscriptions, and zero data leaving your system. What Cloi does: - Contextual error capture: Grabs your stack trace, local files, and environment to understand the issue. - Local LLM inference: Spins up Ollama on your box and…
2025 · github.com
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The magic in AI coding assistants isn't the code -- it's the prompts. I studied the externally observable behavior of Claude Code and recreated it from scratch in Python with the exact same behaviors. It works with any model -- OpenAI, Gemini, Claude. What's surprising: 1. You can keep the core agent really simple, just 280 lines of Python. As long as it supports hooks, custom sub-agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP), then all the rest of the coding-assistant-specific behavior and tools can be factored out into a separate MCP server. 2. The magic is in the prompts (1200 lines of…
2025 · github.com
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This weekend I built a multi-agent coding system which, quite unexpectedly, beat Claude Code on Stanford's Terminal Bench! The architecture is straightforward, consisting of an orchestrator agent that deploys explorer & coder subagents to complete complex terminal based tasks, utilising an intelligent context sharing mechanism along the way which makes it all work. The repo has a lot of technical details, and all the code and prompts for you to play around with if you'd like! I had a lot of fun making this, I hope you have fun reading the README, using it yourself, or even extending it! As…
2025 · github.com
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Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh
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Hi y'all. Been working on something that should've been made a long time ago imo. It compiles codebases into O(1) hashmaps that the agent queries to discover the structure of your code/answer questions/write code. It also does complete static analysis checks on any writes the agent makes. Don't take my word for it though. Here are the benchmarks: https://benzi.fly.dev/benchmark. on 2/20 tests, Claude Code (mostly Sonnet on one task) regressed or timed out. Benzi didn't because of course, it has a map it can query and not get lost in the sauce. On the other 18 it…
29d ago · benzi.fly.dev
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I was tired of setting up my coding environment from scratch whenever I switched machines, and I wanted easy access to Goose AI (an OpenAI-powered coding assistant) without complex configuration. So this weekend I hacked together Goosecode Server - a dockerized VS Code that runs in the browser with the Goose AI agent pre-installed and configured. It's nothing fancy, just combining existing tools in a useful way. What's interesting is that beyond personal use, it can be integrated as a tool call for AI agents people are building. Since it's containerized with a standard interface, you can…
2025 · github.com
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Hey HN, I'm Mo. I've been building Paseo, an open source environment for running Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode across desktop, mobile, web, and CLI. It started last September as a push-to-talk voice interface for Claude Code. I wanted to talk to an agent while going on walks. Then I wanted to see what it was doing. Then text it when I couldn't talk. Then review diffs, run multiple agents, and manage work across machines. After a lot of iteration, it turned into a broader environment. The basic model is: - A daemon runs on your machine (MacBook, desktop, VPS, etc.). - Clients connect to it…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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