If you're looking for an agent implementation that is light on resources, but prefer to work in a terminal, consider also hax (https://usehax.dev/). Less than 2 MB fully static Linux binary, few MBs of RAM use in runtime. Works great with local models also (auto-detects config from running llama-server), besides the usual cloud providers.
If you’re the creator of this harness, you should disclose that. I have nothing against self-promotion, it’s just considered good practice.
Some feedback but it might be worth calling out how your harness differs from other relatively light-weight ones like Pi. I assume its got a much smaller memory footprint given yours is C versus Pi's. There are so many agentic harnesses out there that a comparison table might be a nice thing to have on the landind page.
Note: Just to be clear, I'm not accusing you of trying to hide it, given that the GitHub account for Hax is basically identical to your HN account.
I am the author of hax, yes.
If you are familiar with pi, then some of the key features listed on the GitHub page (and website) already illustrate substantial differences: hax is much smaller in footprint (I wouldn't even call pi "light-weight", really - heavy js runtime with a lot of dependencies), hax preserves native terminal scrollback (pi uses alt-screen fullscreen, or clears in some cases in differential mode), hax uses normal XDG dirs (pi uses ~/.pi), hax is extended out-of-process (pi suggests in-process plugins).
There are other differences in presentation, and in features (for example, hax has background bash invocation out-of-the-box). Not practical to list all of them.
Thanks I'll have to set aside some time later to try it out. It's kind of a sliding scale, but pi is definitely lighter-weight when compared to harnesses like Opencode and the all-batteries included "Oh-My-Pi".
And of course, “lightweight” does have a lot of interpretations where harnesses are concerned (memory footprint, binary size, performance, system prompt, etc).
I love Hax. After a month on Codex, I switched to Hax. I've been using Hax exclusively for a few months now.
Feels so much better, so lightweight. Compiles instantly. Almost no dependencies. Like something Suckless would make. And unlike all the rest, runs easily on OpenBSD.
And as minimal as it is, it even has nice features like showing me after every prompt how much that last task cost me.
When I saw the post here about a new coding harness, I clicked in thinking, "Could anything be better than Hax?" Still no.
Oleksandr, I'm a fan.
I don't understand the value proposition. It “works great for local models” (they all do) so you’ve got more RAM than you possibly need for any TUI you might want to run. Are people really fretting over a few MB of memory rather than evaluating these tools on their ergonomics and features?
I already found myself being limited by Memory used by Claude code, about 300MB per session. With 40 sessions that eats up quite a good chunk of my laptop's memory
Not a big deal since most of my sessions were parked so I just found a way to have them exit without losing the screen content (I took a screen dump from herdr) and a simple wrapper script that waits until hit enter to resume the session.
I don't _ have _ to switch to a lighter weight harness, but I'm not oblivious to memory usage
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Typical coding agents of today consume hundreds of MBs of RAM. Once you add GUI into the mix, that could easily slip into GBs. You might feel the difference, when you're trying to fit a capable local model into small amount of local RAM.
Even on 64 GB RAM machines you could easily get memory pressure on the system when trying to work with a chonky local model. Consider also resource-constrained cases like small VPS servers or SBC computers (like Raspberry Pi).
Ergonomics and features are included too here. The point is that these can coexist with small resource footprint.