How does this do in SWE-Bench Pro and Terminal Bench?
Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
121–130 of 334 posts
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, et…
Exactly, this was my thought process when deciding if we should have Skills or not.
In the end, I think that this prompt-only design, with the integrated tools that come with zerostack, is more than enough.
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#123The key thing with pi is that it can extend itself. How does that work when it’s written in rust?
That's a bit like saying "the key thing with Lisp is that it can extend itself." Yes, that is a core feature and a lot of people use it for that reason. But not everyone. Other use pi just because it is a small agent harness, but don't need (or don't want) the self-extensibility.
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#124Hmm, 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.
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Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#125I love these. Coding agents aren't very difficult to build, it's a TUI + tools + getting a nice agent loop working. The hardest part seems to be supporting all of the different providers and model quirks. What is interesting is seeing the experimentation: some provide tons of tools, others provide a single python interpreter and have the agent use tools via sandboxed python scripts, others use minimal tools and lean…
I'm working on one right now where nearly everything can be expressed as a combination of workflows. There will be some built-in agent types out of the box but all the Lego pieces are there if you want to put together something different.
What language are you building this in? I’m interested but trying to stay away from js world for security reasons.
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#126"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
I'm building an agent framework in golang and it is extremely light weight. Startup time is under 1/2 second, and RAM usage is really low. I have a 12 year old laptop and it happily runs without slowing down. There's no reason what is essentially a string concat engine should be slow on any hardware, including old hardware.
Isn't 2 second startup time a lot? With zerostack, I managed to get it down to ~90ms
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#127This is nice! I tried it for a bit and it was indeed quite fast. Are you looking for contributors, or are you building this as a personal tool? I ran into some issues when attempting to use different models, though: gpt-5.5 on Azure doesn't work, even with the OpenAI compatible endpoint, because "max_tokens" has been replaced with "max_completion_tokens". And it doesn't appear possible to pass through custom headers,…
Yes, I am open for PRs.
What you showed is a clear bug in my codebase, if you can, open a Github issue with each of your bugs.
Thanks!
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#128Sorry, it looks like we were not able to load the page. Please make sure your network connection works and you are using an up-to-date browser. If the issue persists, please visit our issue tracker to report the problem Got this on iPhone firefox
Retry from Safari, sometimes it works better
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#129Now make it into an IntelliJ plugin which has proper access to the search index. I’ll pay for it. For Christs sake it’s insane JetBrains hasn’t figured this out yet
I am currently deciding on adding ACP support or not (and ACP support should allow connections to JetBrains's IDEs)
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#130Hmm, 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.
The data centre runs on a dedicated power line. My laptop runs on battery. Using coding agents currently drains battery quite fast, which is surprising, given that the vast majority of the work does not take place on my laptop.
Making the client side coding agent more efficient isn't about saving the climate. It is about extending the workday (which might actually make the climate worse)