🦀 crabcode

A purely Rust-based AI CLI coding agent with a beautiful terminal UI for interactive "agentic engineering".

In the words of the buildwithpi.ai creators, 'There are many coding agents, this one is mine'.

It's OpenCode but in pure Rust 🦀 w/ my personal flavors.

~ Carlo (Author)

Features

• Made with Rust - Uses ratatui, crossterm and nucleo (fuzzy search), all fast tech.
• Notifications - Sounds, desktop notifications, and terminal alert signals are built in.
• TPS, TTFT, Latency metrics - Also wanted this in opencode, just made it built-in.
• Opens instantly - one of my main motivations why I made this! :D Very lightweight after build.
• Terminal UI (TUI) - Beautiful, responsive interface built with ratatui
• Built for the OpenCode user - works out of the box w/ opencode themes, every UX, and some existing configs so you don't need to force your team to use crabcode.
  • Same UX - carefully ported most of the good UX from OpenCode i.e. shortcuts, etc.
  • Agent System - Switch between PLAN (read-only analysis) and BUILD (implementation) agents with TAB, and custom agents.
  • Multiple Model Support - Works w/ the same models.dev support.
  • Command System - Intuitive commands: /sessions, /new, /connect, /models, /exit + custom commands.
  • Session Management - Create and manage multiple chat sessions
  • Streaming Responses - Real-time streaming of AI responses (w/ aisdk.rs)

Installation

npm install -g crabcode  # npm
bun install -g crabcode  # or bun
cargo binstall crabcode  # or cargo-binstall (prebuilt binary, faster)
cargo install crabcode   # or cargo (build from source)
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Blankeos/crabcode/main/install.sh | sh # or linux/macos (via curl)

Quick Start

1. Run crabcode:

   crabcode

2. Configure your AI model:

   /connect
   

3. Start coding! Type your questions or requests and press Enter.

Usage

It works (almost) exactly like OpenCode. Just opens faster, with some intuitive changes I like, here are most of them:

• Opens instantly!
• Sounds out-of-the-box + clean Desktop notifications!
• Multiworkspace by default, can run like 3+ sessions in the same instance, just works like a webapp.
• Ollama Local CLI connections works out-of-the-box.
• My own remote implementation. Probably worse.
• My own UX preferences:
  • Can click on [Image #1] tags to open them.
  • Themes has no background, all tranluscent (don't really care right now).
  • Lots of toolcall-shapes inspired by the actual Codex harness.
  • When switching models, you can press ⇆ to change thinking efforts.
  • Copy on select is disabled by default. Copy is two-step in crabcode. Gets annoying in OpenCode, especially w/ clipboard history.

Agent Types

• PLAN - Read-only analysis and planning agent. Best for understanding codebases, architecture questions, and planning changes.
• BUILD - Full access implementation agent. Best for writing code, implementing features, and making changes.

Configuration

Your credentials are stored in crabcode's state directory:

• Default: ~/.local/state/crabcode/auth.json
• With XDG_STATE_HOME: $XDG_STATE_HOME/crabcode/auth.json

Read the configuration docs here.

Supported Providers

Will be powered by mostly aisdk + models.dev So most of them will work out of the box.

I tried crabcode specifically for these providers:

• openai (both API key and OAuth, thank you OpenAI for supporting harnesses!)
• opencode-zen and opencode-go
• nano-gpt
• commandcode (Pro)
• ollama-cli
• zai
• ollama-cloud
• xiaomi-token-plan-sgp
• minimax
• fireworks
• baseten

Feel free to create an issue / add to this list if you tried

Known unsupported providers

I might work harder to support these in the future.

• Kimi For Coding Subscription - I keep getting 401 but it works in OpenCode, I may have to contact them first. might support later
• Gemini - It's OAuth + also very unsure. So currently no.
• Claude Code Subscription - Known to explicitly not like harnesses. So never will, sorry.

Development

Run tests

cargo test

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Inspiration

This project was inspired by anomalyco/opencode. Also made this project w/ OpenCode btw, so thank you OpenCode! 🙏

Scope and Limits

• Chat, switch models, agents
• Minimal configurations (I want it to just feel at least like vanilla opencode)
• The cheapest model providers (GLM, etc.)
• A ding sound, my only opencode plugin at the moment.
• No reverse-engineering oauth from big AI (Claude Code, Gemini), at least for now (Don't wanna get in trouble).
• Exception: ChatGPT oauth (because I use it)
• Copy chat contents, copy the chat input
• Image inputs
• Personal remote usage + Browser client equivalent.
• ACP w/ Zed? (very far, idk how to do that)
• No Claude Code oauth spoofing.
• No plugin ecosystem (If I think it's worth building, just make it built-in and configurable i.e. sounds)
• No desktop app

Why?

I'm learning rust :D. Built a few TUIs as practice. Also been making AI chat apps on web, so I wanna work on this.