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

mring33621

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!

hmokiguess

Nice work! Thank you for sharing it.

myshapeprotocol

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

torstenvl

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

megamorf

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.

Bleaphar

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!

jarjoura

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.

all2

Note to be confused with Haxe: https://haxe.org/

iJohnDoe

This looks really interesting! Excited to give it a try.

IamDaedalus

oh cool! how do I contribute? :)

abawany

I just installed it via homebrew on macos and used the anthropic-compatible custom provider option to configure it to use with deepseek-flash and then used this setup to build a quick rust project that I had been deferring for months - total cost: 1 us cent and under 10 minutes total for setup and etc. Thank you for making such a lean and clean option.

losvedir

Something about having a very fast, very small harness written in C only to drive LLMs amuses me. Like putting a big ass spoiler on a minivan or something.

androiddrew

Omg C, so insecure! You should be ashamed of my insecurity!

mark_l_watson

I didn't try Hax but I hope someone who has can answer a question: does it support suspending current operation if user hits ESC key? EDIT: I just looked at interrupt.c in the github repo: handles user interrupts. I trashed my Common Lisp harness because I had problems handling interrupts in a portable way. I did better with Racket. I am traveling on vacation without a computer, will try Hax when I get home.