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.
Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
31–40 of 334 posts
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#32The 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.
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
#33Earlier 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.
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
#34Earlier 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…
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
#35Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#36Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#37Imo, this shouldn't be embedded in the executor layer. Orchestration should handle this.
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#38Given 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…
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.
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
#40Given 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…