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Hax – a minimalist, terminal-native coding agent written in C
- mring33621 2mo agoI 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 2mo agoNice work! Thank you for sharing it.
- owencmcgrath 2mo ago[flagged]
- myshapeprotocol 2mo ago[flagged]
- torstenvl 2mo agoIf it's minimalist and written in C why does it have such specific system requirements?
- megamorf 2mo agoI 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.
- mfro 2mo agoBecause C is the best.
- lelanthran 2mo ago> 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 you think that unintended consequences can result from using C, boy do I have some news for you for "programmers" from 2026.
- jesse__ 2mo agoI lol'd at this
- andai 2mo agoWhat are your thoughts on JavaScript?
- qrios 2mo agoFrom the README.md: If "fancy new AI tech in an old-school minimalist package" sounds like your vibe, you might like this. What is the question about: A: Why start a 'new' software project? (instead of old, none, multiple, ...) B: Why in 'C'? (instead of Mojo, Java, D, ...) C: Why 'today'? (instead of Yesterday, Tomorrow, never, ...) For me the beauty of this project is: Someone tried to figure out for themselves what an end-to-end process would look like for what they wanted to do. What happens to the input? How are files written? What is sent to the LLMs? And they used the tool they know best. No `import openai`.
- iberator 2mo agoC is the most portable language on the planet. Literally every single cpu/mcu architecture from the past 40 years supports it. There are hundreds of such architectures and CPU/MCU types. (x86 is just SINGLE type from maaaaany).
- Bleaphar 2mo agoWould 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!
- OleksandrC 2mo agoThe main reason to use C is that it's the easiest way to achieve minimal resource footprint. Also it's the language I know really well already. The demo was recorded with asciinema.
- 0xc133 2mo agoasciinema is so good! Love seeing the player on the site.
- jarjoura 2mo agoThis 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.
- OleksandrC 2mo agoGenerally, the models seem to adapt really well. I am using GPT models in hax a lot, and they have no trouble whatsoever using hax tools instead of their "native" codex tools. Also since hax tools are just "read", "edit", "write", "bash" and "task_wait", it would be expected that the models would use one-off scripts to achieve their goals (either shell scripts, or python scripts, etc).
- ChoosesBarbecue 2mo agoI know the Pi [0] folks had some trouble with newer models [1]. [0]: https://pi.dev/ https://pi.dev/ [1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/7/4/better-models-worse-tools/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/7/4/better-models-worse-tools/
- GrayShade 2mo agohttps://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode (not affiliated, just saw someone posting it here) and of course Codex are still active.
- all2 2mo agoNote to be confused with Haxe: https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo agoI've been having a great time using haxe & reflaxe macros for code generation. You can have some minimal haxe code and build tiny compilers that use it as a source of truth for generating a http client, http server stub, cli entrypoint, docs entry, integration test, openapi spec.... Agents are good at writing the macros for whatever language you want to compile to, and now you've enforced agreement between these things as part of a build, which makes for several fewer things that you ought to be diligent about. Unlike using something like yaml as your source of truth, haxe has a type system. You can catch some problems upstream as build errors rather than waiting to catch them downstream in the generated code. Highly recommended.
- all2 2mo agoThis sounds amazing. I might give this a go!
- iJohnDoe 2mo agoThis looks really interesting! Excited to give it a try.
- IamDaedalus 2mo agooh cool! how do I contribute? :)
- OleksandrC 2mo agoAs usual, I suppose :) - by filing bug reports, and opening pull requests.
- abawany 2mo agoI 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 2mo agoSomething 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.
- tjoff 2mo agoWell, you'd think so but given how slow and resource hungry the ones written in javascript are it makes a lot of sense.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- para_parolu 2mo agoAre they? I use pi and it doesn’t drain more than other software.
- pm25coder 2mo ago[flagged]
- snvzz 2mo agoThe LLM can run elsewhere, such as the cloud. For the part that runs locally, efficiency might matter.
- bobleer 2mo ago[flagged]
- androiddrew 2mo agoOmg C, so insecure! You should be ashamed of my insecurity!
- mark_l_watson 2mo agoI 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.
- qrios 2mo agoWorks better than in Claude Code.
- amoss 2mo agoTried it after seeing the comment about it yesterday and loving it so far. Very clean, easy and fast to build. Performance is great, and the minimal UI is a breath of fresh air.