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#rust#code#agent#zerostack#project#prompt#skills#more#agents#context
Discussion (46 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The smarter the models get the less the harnesses matter (outside of devx).
I like this, Claude Code is using multiple gigabytes, which is really annoying on lowend laptops
There's no reason what is essentially a string concat engine should be slow on any hardware, including old hardware.
The reasons why the memory footprint of zerostack are:
- Rust, and not JS/Python, so no interpreters/VMs on top
- Load-as-needed, so we only allocate things like LLM connectors when needed
- `smallvec` used for most of the array usage of the tool (up to N items are stored in stack)
- `compactstring` used for most of the string usage of the tool (up to N chars are stored in stack)
- `opt-level=z` to force LLVM to optimize for binary size and not for performance (even tho we still beat both in TTFT and in tool use time opencode)
- heavy usage of [LTO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interprocedural_optimization#W...)
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 superpowers + Claude's frontend-design
2. Compile-time features; things that might make the agent more bloated can be disabled when you decide to compile zerostack
3. Clean code; code that's short and easy to read, you can just throw zerostack on its own source code in order to build a custom fork if your necessity can't be satisfied. Good features could also be adopted by the main version.
4. Permission mode; as you can see in the README, there was lots of concern around the permission model, and I landed on a 4-mode system that goes from "Restrictive" (no commands) to "YOLO" (whatever the agent wants to do" + custom regex patterns for allow/ask/deny permission on 'bash' calls. In your case, you just need to run `zerostack -R` to force all tools to ask for permission.
(Also, there is a work-in-progress features for programmable agents, but that's yet to be announced)
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).
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.
`cargo add` tip is very helpful, I had a hunch this happened in my own Rust project and I think you just filled in the missing piece for me there.
1. I had experience not only with wrong versions selected by the agents, but also weird crates (ex. choosing a crate with 10 github stars when a more complete and more supported one was available), reason why now I always choose the dependencies and then I let the agent work.
2. Yes, some of the provider code could be made using macros, I am just lazy... But thanks for the tip! I will save it for later.
3. No telemetry, and it can be checked thanks to the fact that there are no HTTP calls outside of the MCP implementation (via rmcp) and LLM connectors (via rig)
4. Yes, i set panic handler to 'abort', thinking that I would've get a nice size decrease: i yet have to experience a panic on this project, but I will revert it to default behavior if the binary size saving is really so small
5. While it is async, the entire project runs on one thread (as expressed in the main.rs with ```#[tokio::main(flavor = "current_thread")]```), as it allows for a nice ~8MB memory saving (so, 50% off) and no real performance loss, being such a simple tool.
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P.S. Just switched back to default settings for panic handler
Doesn't prompt injection make that a rather flimsy investigation?
Will check this out! Seems cool!
$ airun -q -p 'output a shell command for linux to display the current time. output only the command with no other code fencing or prose' | airun -q -s 'review the provided shell command, determine if it is safe, run it only if it is safe, and then summarize the output from the command' --permissions-allow='bash:date *'
I personally decided to not implement Skills and instead using a prompt library approach, where certain .md are used to fully replace the system prompt, in order to allow for an approach similar to Skills with ~100 LoC dedicated to this system.
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
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 that can be selected from the TUI in order to activate different 'agents': as you can see from the README, it is designed to contain the most important feautres of superpower + Claude's front-end design + git worktree support and Ralph Wiggum loops (both as integrated features)
2. As said before, there are no benchmarks right now, but it is good enough for me, so I hope it's good enough for y'all :)
3. Transfering settings from other agents is out-of-scope for a minimalstic coding agent, but the idea is that, apart from MCP server, the rest might just force you to learn how zerostack works, because of design choices such as not having Skills or having certain specialized tools integrated (worktrees and loops).
a low level language. please no more scripting language TUIs!
It just does not rely on GC and allows to manage resources efficiently. This efficiency is partly due to its being so high-level.
This is obv only a technical talk, as writing an AI TUI in pure C would be rather... ehhh
Lower-level languages like Zig or even Go, to say nothing of C, lack many of the high-level language features that power this efficiency.
-- So is deepseek-tui.