Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgot to add an open source qualifier. I use codex lol
Codex is also opensource.
Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
21–30 of 334 posts
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#22$ airun -q -p 'output a shell command for linux to display the current time. output only the command with no other code fencing or prose' | airun -q -s 'review the provided shell command, determine if it is safe, run it only if it is safe, and then summarize the output from the command' --permissions-allow='bash:date *'
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#23this is what I've been waiting for a low level language. please no more scripting language TUIs!
Rust, a language with affine types, generics, lifetimes, deep static analysis, hygienic macros, etc is not low-level. It's nearly as high-level as Haskell (without HKTs though). It just does not rely on GC and allows to manage resources efficiently. This efficiency is partly due to its being so high-level.
This is obv only a technical talk, as writing an AI TUI in pure C would be rather... ehhh
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Funny enough, a good chunk of the coding was done by Deepseek v4 Flash, while I hand-wrote a couple of the TUI logic, as deepseek kept failing on certain cursor-moving logic, and I fully managed the memory optimization process (as you can read on another comment I left, it both a set of compiler optimizations and usage of certain Rust crates in order to leverage more efficient data structures).
Taking notes and comparing this against my own (non coding agent) Rust TUI project, thank you! I'm new to Rust so this is a helpful baseline.
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#25Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#26i built something with a similar philosophy here: https://github.com/khimaros/airun -- it is intended to be piped and redirected. it discovers skills, AGENTS and prompt templates from Claude Code, Pi.dev, OpenCode and others. no TUI, but does have a basic tool calling loop $ airun -q -p 'output a shell command for linux to display the current time. output only the command with no other code fencing or prose' | airun…
I personally decided to not implement Skills and instead using a prompt library approach, where certain .md are used to fully replace the system prompt, in order to allow for an approach similar to Skills with ~100 LoC dedicated to this system.
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#27"RAM footprint: ~8MB on an empty session, ~12MB when working" I like this, Claude Code is using multiple gigabytes, which is really annoying on lowend laptops
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#28Thanks, I've been tooling away in my spare time on my own version of this -- both to get a deeper understanding of agents (everyone suggests writing your own) and to help learn Rust. I'd like to retain `pi`'s configurability though, the ability to self-mutate and generate new tools is incredibly useful, particularly because I don't think any of these things should have access to arbitrary code execution through `bash…
I decided to allow for customization in a different way:
1. The prompt library (~/.config/hypernova/prompts/) acts as a simpler alternative to Skills, with the built-in prompts that should replace superpowers + Claude's frontend-design
2. Compile-time features; things that might make the agent more bloated can be disabled when you decide to compile zerostack
3. Clean code; code that's short and easy to read, you can just throw zerostack on its own source code in order to build a custom fork if your necessity can't be satisfied. Good features could also be adopted by the main version.
4. Permission mode; as you can see in the README, there was lots of concern around the permission model, and I landed on a 4-mode system that goes from "Restrictive" (no commands) to "YOLO" (whatever the agent wants to do" + custom regex patterns for allow/ask/deny permission on 'bash' calls. In your case, you just need to run `zerostack -R` to force all tools to ask for permission.
(Also, there is a work-in-progress features for programmable agents, but that's yet to be announced)
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#29Funny this comes out today. I was just about to start to write one in rust. It's amazing having opencode slowly leak memory and end up becoming 6gbs on a large project and then get slower and slower. Will check this out! Seems cool!
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#30Thanks, I've been tooling away in my spare time on my own version of this -- both to get a deeper understanding of agents (everyone suggests writing your own) and to help learn Rust. I'd like to retain `pi`'s configurability though, the ability to self-mutate and generate new tools is incredibly useful, particularly because I don't think any of these things should have access to arbitrary code execution through `bash…
I actually though about this issue, but while Pi can have this script-like environment thanks to the fact that it's based on an interpreted language (TypeScript), Rust has its own limitation as a compiled language. I decided to allow for customization in a different way: 1. The prompt library (~/.config/hypernova/prompts/) acts as a simpler alternative to Skills, with the built-in prompts that should replace superpow…