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

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181–190 of 334 posts

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

#181

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

Simplest explanation I could come up with: Just for hype and fun.

Rewriting things in rust is "cool". Bun did it, other projects did it. Therefore, writing a coding agent in one should be cool too.

And apparently enough HN crowd agrees with it to take the #1 spot on the board.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Junie does not support BYOK inside the IDE

Has this position recently changed? It states this on the marketing page? > Use a JetBrains AI subscription or connect your preferred provider with Bring Your Own Key (BYOK).

It seem confusing. My understanding is the AI assistant part (i.e. chat) is configurable. But Junie IDE is only via credits through Jetbrains.

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/articles/SUPPORT-A-1833/What-...

(To make it more confusing, Junie CLI seems to say it will any provider)

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

#184

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

Even a simple coding agent TUI should work instantenously, which I sadly cannot say is true about typescript-based applications like Claude Code or Gemini.

After switching away from GNOME Terminal + Zsh to Ghostty + Nushell, I started to appreciate how instant everything feels. Why not make everything just as fast?

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

#185

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

I see spreading Rust as an overall good thing, because it changes benchmark on how software should feel in terms of performance, stability, memory footprint.

So even if it doesn't create tangible advantage in a particular use case - its still good for the whole industry.

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

#186
post #87

As you can see, writing a coding agent in a compiled language makes a ton of sense and gives the benefits of running multiple agents efficiently instead of running into leaks and tools consuming gigabytes of RAM.

That makes no sense, coding harness are just subprocess wrappers + http calls. What is the benefit if at the end of the day it will spawn make,cmake,python,node.js, or whatever the developer is working on? With the enormous downside of loosing native/easy extensibility, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is derived from JavaScript, it seamlessly parses and dumps.

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

#187

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

While we are not there yet, people are looking into running agents in esp32 and alike.

See projects such as picoclaw, nullclaw and more.

https://github.com/sipeed/picoclaw

https://github.com/nullclaw/nullclaw

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

#188

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

Opencode can be surprisingly hard on the CPU (could be an issue when coding on battery or a weak remote VM), and uses a lot of RAM. A little competition is always welcome.

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

#189

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

Before I tried coding agents my guess would have been: none.

But seeing how slow claude code and copilot cli are and how much ram they use I'm flabbergasted. If you have long running sessions they can both take tens pf gigabytes of ram and feel quite sluggish.

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

#190

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

I didn't see anyone mention this, but I think having a single binary is much nicer than having a JS (or Python) program sprawled all over your system.
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