codebase

An AI coding agent that lives in your terminal.
Any LLM. Reads your project, writes code, runs commands, ships work.

Install

Requires Node.js ≥ 20.

# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://codebase.design/install.sh | sh

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://codebase.design/install.ps1 | iex

# any platform, with npm
npm i -g codebase-cli

Then, in any project:

cd your-project
codebase

Type, hit enter. It reads files, edits code, runs tests, and shows its work. /help lists everything.

Pick your LLM

Bring your own key — Anthropic, OpenAI, Groq, OpenRouter, Mistral, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint:

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-... codebase     # or OPENAI_API_KEY, GROQ_API_KEY, …

Or sign in once and skip the key wrangling — codebase.design gives you a free taste of open-weight models, and a paid account uncaps those plus the frontier models (Claude Opus/Sonnet, GPT-5, …) behind one bill. First run walks you through it; it even auto-detects a local LLM (LM Studio / Ollama / vLLM).

codebase auth login

Swap models live with /model. Set reasoning depth with /effort.

What makes it good

• 🏁 Tournaments. /tournament <task> races several agents on the same change in isolated worktrees, a judge ranks them, you merge the winner. --models opus,sonnet,haiku pits models head-to-head on your code.
• ↺ Rewind anything. /rewind rolls the conversation and the files back to before any earlier prompt — a bad turn fully un-happens. Every edit is checkpointed.
• 🧠 Remembers across sessions. Pulls durable facts (your prefs, project decisions, the rules you set) out of a session in the background so the next one starts informed. #note to add one by hand.
• 🔌 MCP. Connect external tool servers (filesystem, Postgres, git, fetch, …) over stdio or remote HTTP, OAuth and all. Their tools splice straight into the agent.
• 🤖 Subagents. Fan out read-only researchers or write-capable workers that keep their tool-noise out of your main context — each can run in its own git worktree, on its own model and reasoning level.
• 🪝 Hooks. Shell commands on lifecycle events (pre/post tool, edit, prompt, session start/end) — run a formatter on save, block secrets, commit on exit.
• 🌐 SSH. Run commands on enrolled remote hosts by name, behind the same safety validator as the local shell.

…plus a fast differential TUI (clean copy-mode with Ctrl-O, image paste with Ctrl-V, history search with Ctrl-R, $EDITOR compose with Ctrl-G), plan mode for a cheap Q&A pass before editing, auto-compaction of long sessions, multi-session resume (/resume, /rename, /tag), skills & output styles as drop-in markdown, 45+ tools behind one interface, and effect-based permissions you can teach with /permissions.

Cheat sheet

/model /effort /plan /tournament /rewind /resume /permissions /mcp /agents /help
!cmd     run a shell command without spending a turn
@path    pin a file into the next prompt
#note    save a memory   ·   \<Enter>  multi-line   ·   Ctrl-C  stop turn / exit

Type while it's working — your prompt queues and fires when the turn ends.

Built on pi

The agent loop, provider adapters, and session protocol come from pi (MIT). Go give them a star.

More

• CLAUDE.md — full feature reference
• .settings/ — tenets, architecture, extending, testing
• docs/MIGRATION_v1_to_v2.md — upgrading from the Go v1 binary
• /help inside the CLI — every command and shortcut

License

MIT.