Hax – a minimalist, terminal-native coding agent written in C

This is cool! There were a few rust attempts I played around with last year, but they all seemed to fizzle out in favor of everything running on top of js or python.

I know that Google just launched a go version a couple months ago, but I haven't really spent any time with it, because well, gemini isn't really useful to me right now.

The thing I constantly ran into with using non-platform (ie. claude code or codex) agents is that even though their tool call API seems flexible, they've finetuned these "agentic" models around their specific agents. Opus is the worst I've seen about this. It really wants to use specific bash tools and if you restrict or hide it, it'll start writing python code to call into bash to do it.

Would love to hear more about the decision to create the terminal in C? Also what did you use to record your demo video? It looks awesome!

A minimalist, terminal-native coding agent written in C is such a clean approach to lightweight local tooling. Love the tech stack choice.

I don't understand why anyone would still start a new software project in C today, given the long track record of mistakes developers can make in it.

If it's minimalist and written in C why does it have such specific system requirements?

I just built and installed this harness on my MacBook Pro and am very happy with its clean, fast performance with local models and llama.cpp.

Well done, Oleksandr!

Nice work! Thank you for sharing it.