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

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

#111

Post by arjie »

I had Claude Code build me one of these as well, though I added Dirac's line hashing for edits etc. Also used Rust, and I had this idea that I should use plugins so it can self-edit by implementing in hooks but in the end, I just have it create exhaust information about improvements into a separate file and just update the source code and recompile. The source code is in a fixed place so it can just rewrite and build the agent itself. I use it with DeepSeek 4 Flash running on 2x RTX 6000 Pros which I get some 138 tok/s on.

To be honest, I just plagiarized Pi, Dirac, OpenCode. Any new tricks in this one that I can steal?

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

#112

Post by slowhorse »

frio wrote: post #30
gidellav wrote: post #28

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 agree v8 and Deno seems very heavy handed and complex to integrate for scripting capabilities.

Have you considered Lua? It is tailor made for use cases like this. Creating an embedded host in Rust is trivial, the work lies in creating built-in functions for the script runtime so that the user scripts can do useful things to the environment.

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

#113

Post by aerzen »

gidellav wrote: post #28
frio wrote: post #25

Thanks, 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…

Ok, what about having tools be discoverable from the environment, similar to how $PATH works in POSIX?

There could be an env var $AGENT_TOOLS, a string of paths delimited by `:` and tools would be discovered as some specific format of file. Maybe a JSON that contains tool name, list of parameters and the command to run it.

This is essentially decoupling tools from the agent, allowing more customization and per-project environments. It does require shipping and installing more binaries, one for each tool probably.

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

#115

Post by SwellJoe »

bluegatty wrote: post #75
SwellJoe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context window is not on your system. It's on the server with the model. There may be some local prompt caching, of some sort, but you're not locally hosting the context unless you're also locally hosting the model.

Chat history is kept locally, generally you have to send the 'whole history' to the model 'each turn'.

That's just the plain text (or whatever files), that's not the context the model is directly working with on the server, which is tokenized, embedded, vectorized and has attention run against those vectors. The local history is generally quite small, the context generally quite a bit larger. A text conversation of a few hundred kilobytes in plain text will be gigabytes in context.

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

#116

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

Hmm, Claude Code and Opencode work fine for me.

It's a bit amusing that coding agents rely on drawing 1000W+ and using 2TB+ of memory in a datacenter to run, yet people really focus on the last few watts and few hundred megabytes of memory on their laptop (which get dwarfed by the energy cost of compiling their code anyways). But I suppose making them a bit faster and lighter wouldn't hurt.

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

#117

Post by lunar_mycroft »

kristjansson wrote: post #105
gidellav wrote: post #28

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…

> simpler alternative to Skills this concerns me. Skills are already just about the simplest possible thing; they're just prompts, in a directory!

Skills are notably more complex than that. They require metadata (which the model is given and uses to determine whether or not to load the main file), are intended to be loaded via a tool call, contain extra resources (also loaded by tool calls), etc. In contrast, with this system the harness doesn't need a tool to load the stored prompts, the prompts don't need to include metadata to allow for runtime discovery, etc.

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

#118

Post by gidellav »

arjie wrote: post #111

I had Claude Code build me one of these as well, though I added Dirac's line hashing for edits etc. Also used Rust, and I had this idea that I should use plugins so it can self-edit by implementing in hooks but in the end, I just have it create exhaust information about improvements into a separate file and just update the source code and recompile. The source code is in a fixed place so it can just rewrite and build…

Some interesting features I add on top of being lightweight are the prompts library, Git worktrees integration and Ralph Wiggum loops integrations.

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

#119

Post by gidellav »

aerzen wrote: post #113
gidellav wrote: post #28

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…

Ok, what about having tools be discoverable from the environment, similar to how $PATH works in POSIX? There could be an env var $AGENT_TOOLS, a string of paths delimited by `:` and tools would be discovered as some specific format of file. Maybe a JSON that contains tool name, list of parameters and the command to run it. This is essentially decoupling tools from the agent, allowing more customization and per-projec…

I understand the concept, but I don't get what's the advantage over adding in the prompt instructions to use a specific bash command for a specific task, acting as a "custom tool".

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

#120

Post by goyozi »

Really neat, I’ll have to try it when I’m at home. Lean, fast tools really make a difference in the coding experience.

I’m curious how the prompts idea performs in practice compared to typical skills and subagents. I frequently combine the two to get otherwise tricky workflows done. Say I have a failing build. I invoke my /fix-ci skill (sometimes in the same context I made the code change in), it launches a subagent to extract an error message / stack traces / relevant logs, and works through the problem. Say an integration test ran into a db query issue. Sometimes the agent itself, sometimes with a slight nudge from me, will load the readonly db access skill and start investigating. If I expect long, deep shenanigans, I’ll often say something like „use a sonnet subagent and instruct it to use the db query skill to debug the behavior we’re seeing”. And it can keep going like that: skills give extra capabilities on the fly, subagents isolate context to prevent bloat. Intuitively, it seems that by the agent running itself via bash with different prompts _might_ come close but a bit less streamlined? I’d have to check and see.

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