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Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

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31–40 of 334 posts

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#31
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Codex is also opensource.

I don't really want something owned by a company for my local stuff. I'd prefer it be small and minimalistic. Maybe in the future I'll change my mind and it will be more like a browser but for now I wanna keep it small and local.

Thanks! I don't think that the only advantages are being open and lightweight, but you can actually find some more interesting features such as Ollama support, integrated Prompts (in order to compete with superpowers), git worktrees integration, and so on

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#32

The codebase was small enough that I handed it over to DeepSeek v4 Flash in Pi to skim through for any risky business, and I didn't find anything concerning. Nice work.

Since the OP stated they used DeepSeek V4 Flash for generating a lot of the code, I decided to check whether there were any outdated dependencies. In my experience, with Rust projects, if you do not instruct models (even Claude 4.7 Opus) to use `cargo add` instead of manually editing the Cargo.toml, you will almost certainly get out-of-date dependencies added to your project.

Manually checking the dependencies used by this project, I was pleased to see they are all the latest version. That doesn't mean there are no issues lurking in transitive dependencies, of course.

As for getting an LLM to review the code, I think we can get all opinionated very fast. For instance, when I was eyeballing the code, some of the enum methods converting to/from strings made me think "this could've been a single #[derive] with strum." That would make the code in provider.rs a lot more concise, at the cost of importing one crate (with no dependencies!)

Lastly, for fun, I decided to get DeepSeek V4 Pro (with Max thinking) to "audit" the codebase. The output mentioned no obvious signs of hidden telemetry, but it did note that the project sets the panic handler to "abort", which I have strong opinions on... Presumably the OP wanted to avoid linking against libunwind to save a few kilobytes of binary size, but now you have a binary that immediately aborts and doesn't give the user a stacktrace of what just crashed. I would rather have a ~50 KiB larger binary if it means getting useful debug info during a panic. Additionally, if there are async tasks that panic, they can't be recovered to display a generic error message; instead the whole process just aborts.

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#33
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been trying to use `Deno` underneath `Rust` so that the tools can still be written in Typescript and thus self-mutated without the compilation step (but I can still try to do clever things with V8 Isolates or similar). It's been an ugly experiment so far; I'm vaguely thinking a simpler model would be to just define a binary "API" and run tools by exec-ing binaries.

I have to be honest and tell you that try to load such an heavy runtime as a scripting layer is not a great idea; at the same time I can tell you that I am working on another Rust project where I also needed scripting, and after three attempts I landed on rhai (https://rhai.rs/) (https://rhai.rs/book).

You might find it nice for pretty much all use cases except for high-performance scripting (so, if you are not try to build the entire logic entirely in rhai, you are going to be fine).

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to use `Deno` underneath `Rust` so that the tools can still be written in Typescript and thus self-mutated without the compilation step (but I can still try to do clever things with V8 Isolates or similar). It's been an ugly experiment so far; I'm vaguely thinking a simpler model would be to just define a binary "API" and run tools by exec-ing binaries.

I have to be honest and tell you that try to load such an heavy runtime as a scripting layer is not a great idea; at the same time I can tell you that I am working on another Rust project where I also needed scripting, and after three attempts I landed on rhai ( https://rhai.rs/ ) ( https://rhai.rs/book ). You might find it nice for pretty much all use cases except for high-performance scripting (so, if you are not t…

Yeah, it's been a bit of a dead end. I didn't want the heavy runtime but felt it was worth disproving after experimenting rather than ruling out off the bat. Even before getting it running, the dependency list alone was pretty discouraging, especially given the storm of supply chain attacks these days.

Rhai looks nice, I'll take a look, thanks! And good luck with Zerostack.

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#38

Given agent harnesses affect so much of the performance of models, it would be great to see some kind of benchmark on how this tool performs compared to claude/codex/opencode/pi etc.

Hi! While I didn't try any agent benchmark, I already though of this possible issue, and I tried to approach it on two different levels: 1. The tools that are given to the agent are almost the same to the one defined in Opencode, except for Skills and Subagents (both features not implemented in zerostack) 2. Zerostack is prompt-based, so that it ships with a set of .md files, stored in ~/.config/zerostack/prompt, and…

[deleted]

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#39

> Integrated Ralph Wiggum loops: looping capabilities for long-horizon tasks Imo, this shouldn't be embedded in the executor layer. Orchestration should handle this.

I get you, but when I decided to follow a no-skills approach (as in, no agent's Skills used), I had to decide what:

1. Couldn't be built only using prompts

2. Couldn't be built only using MCP servers

3. Would have improved my UX experience (as i hope, your UX experience).

From those three conditions, I chose integrated git worktrees and loops

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#40

Given agent harnesses affect so much of the performance of models, it would be great to see some kind of benchmark on how this tool performs compared to claude/codex/opencode/pi etc.

Hi! While I didn't try any agent benchmark, I already though of this possible issue, and I tried to approach it on two different levels: 1. The tools that are given to the agent are almost the same to the one defined in Opencode, except for Skills and Subagents (both features not implemented in zerostack) 2. Zerostack is prompt-based, so that it ships with a set of .md files, stored in ~/.config/zerostack/prompt, and…

It's been said before, but it is important to prospective users, so it bears repeating: screenshots and benchmarks, please; it helps users decide whether to invest time in it. The ability to transfer settings from other agents would be great too.
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