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If you like this list of "why?", you might also like this: https://usehax.dev/ (I am the author). Most of the list applies, similar minimalist Unix tool approach, with some differences. Hax is written in C, the dynamically linked binary is even smaller (0.6 MB), MIT-licensed. No wasm though.

Important difference - fx is currently Vercel AI Gateway only - while hax does support multiple providers already (OpenAI API, ChatGPT/Codex subscription, Anthropic API, OpenRouter, OpenCode Zen/Go), and integrates well out of the box with local llama-server.

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It’s funny what “tiny” means for different people depending on their background. I expected it to be under an MB as well and was surprised by 6MB.
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Basically, for me tiny means it fits on a floppy 1.44 HD.

Naturally meaningless when people carry around USB sticks that might even hold a 1 TB, but alas.

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> Naturally meaningless when people carry around USB sticks

Do people do that? I think it was a decade ago, I thought people download from web nowadays.

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Pretty much my baseline as well. Good example how experiences shape our thinking.
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For comparison, I publish a CLI tool written in Dart, can compile to native anything including Wasm , the Linux binary is around 5MB and it does quite a lot.
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A typical Go binary would be 2-3 times larger. A typical Node project would easily pull more than 6 MiB of just code, not counting the runtime.
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I really like the philosophy document! https://github.com/OleksandrChekhovskyi/hax/blob/master/docs...

I don’t know if I am ready to use a new tool written in C and using libcurl but I will give it a shot.

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that's an amazing project! people always say why 6mb vs CC's 250mb even matter when you are calling out to LLMs hosted in the cloud. But... I regularly run hierarchies of agents with say 50-100 on a regular basis. So 650 vs 25050 ... is "can do" vs "cannot"
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Is that real memory taken? If it's shared code from the same executable surely the multiples are not very relevant?
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this looks great! what are you using it for? i like the idea of being able to use one of these (sandboxed) within a larger program kind of like how I use LLM's to do small tasks within my apps now but with a few tools (web search). my current way of doing that is like building a mini-harness with a couple tools within the app, but something more drop-in would be better obviously.
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I was going to ask if there's any plans to integrate something like the fx's ACP server[1] or pi's RPC mode [2].

I'm making something like Paseo and hax is very interesting as a Pi replacement.

[1] https://fx.sh/docs/using-fx/acp

[2] https://pi.dev/docs/latest/rpc

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It looks really nice. Do you have any plan to support Claude subscriptions (pro/max)?
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Technically, this would be straightforward. The problem is that Anthropic seems to be really against using Claude subscriptions with anything other than Claude Code - you might even risk your account getting banned for doing so. You could search online for the "openclaw claude banned" for more details on that story.
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Didn't Anthropic stop allowing it, can only use the subscriptions with first-party tools?
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Does it have anything co-designed around Vercel infrastructure? This is what happened to NextJS and why I will likely never touch Vercel open source again
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Yeah, I see the Vercel logo, and I am instantly out.
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Very neat. The demo on the page feels very intuitive to me! (if you're used to bash at least)
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I've only done a little of the new opencode v2 "mini" but it too offers a nice preserve-scroll by default.

OpenCode is the best behaved TUI i've seen by far (they invented OpenTUI to make it so good, also in Zig), so it feels less crucial. But it's nice to have there!

The "small core" model is very popular all of a sudden. DeepSeek's new harness is famously like that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285244

OpenCode isn't quite as small, but there's very much been a deliberate attempt to drive much more into a plugin-based system. I enjoyed Dax talking about the new constitution of opencode, and the results of his agent comparing OpenCode & the new DeepSeek. https://bsky.app/profile/thdxr.com/post/3msy4gjttoc2f https://bsky.app/profile/thdxr.com/post/3msygiqyg6v2y

> an architectural change we made in opencode2 is nearly everything is an internal plugin / there's 68 of them that cover our built in agents, integrations, config loading, etc

i also think this is such a brilliant fun architectural twist too:

> OpenCode is the first time i could justify event sourcing in a real system / everything that happens is an event which gets projected into the sqlite db

https://bsky.app/profile/thdxr.com/post/3mt2qx3ktib2c

it's so fun seeing new malleable software cores emerge, try to figure out how to augment agency. agentic software striving itself to extend the agency it itself offers. it's been way too long since we've had ambitions to build general system, architectures that serve more than the user. this has held computing back for far too long. this is such an excellent interesting field, of such a more ambitious computing, opening up.

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Thanks for the links on opencode 2! I’ve been meaning to get into this as I’ve been frustrated about some opencode 1’s behavior and design. Many of the encounters made me come up with ideas I’m happy to see they also had! As much fun as it may have been to build my own harness, I feel like the core primitives should be pretty well understood by now (in fact I envision a standard core library / API design taking shape).
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Most of all what you have said is not really any clear differentiation against the rest of the 100s of other agents. Just minuscule or non-negligible implementation details and I'm afraid it is sadly yet another experimental slop project.

It is a branded "mee too" coding agent that we have seen hundreds of them already.

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I can't say I'm super into all the agents that are being created. But I do try to keep up here on HN and I can't say that I can remember any with this particular set of attributes.

In particular, aiming to be embeddable into other projects seems rather notable. At least, not something I've remembered of other projects that have made there way across the HN front page.

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Pi is a composition of libraries that can be used to build agents. That seems far more interesting than this “minimal” agent.

This was written in zig and built by vercel. That’s the only notable characteristics about this project.

All code agents look the same and this one is no different.

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I don't think Pi is tiny because it's written in typescript and requires a javascript runtime. I definitely want a "tiny" compiled agent with no runtime requirements.

I don't think Zig is that great of a language for this, but it's better than typescript. I don't want to use Vercel software so will pass, but would love to see a more community driven effort.

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What’s a better lang in your opinion?
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Almost every harness has an SDK now, it seems part of the "mvp" at this point, both open and closed source

https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/codex-sdk

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview

https://opencode.ai/docs/sdk/

https://pi.dev/docs/latest/sdk

or if you want SDK first, my recommendation is https://adk.dev/

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"- For end users, its CLI output style and form factor aims to be closer to a Unix shell than a heavy "IDE in the terminal" TUI."

I've actually been wondering lately why coding agent functionality isn't just... part of my shell already. Just another kind of interaction modality with an existing shell. Could probably even be an extension to fish or nu-shell even.

Please stop me from forking off on yet another project though.

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Originally, Warp was doing just that. Reimagining the terminal including making AI a part of it. I don't think they really found much purchase there because they ended up needing to make a platform out of it:

https://www.warp.dev/

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Yeah terminal window is a bit of a different story, though. I mean the actual shell binary.

With some ... intensive ... security/sandboxing/containerizing of some kind though, I guess.

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