Code Assistant
An LLM-powered, autonomous coding assistant. Also offers an MCP and ACP mode.
- Transport
- Not stated
- Package
- —
- Registry id
- —
No install snippet on purpose. A working MCP config is a command, its arguments and an environment block — the last two are where API keys live, so this catalogue never stores them and cannot publish them. Follow the link above for the authors' own instructions.
An open-source AI coding agent, written in Rust, with a native GUI, a terminal mode, and integrations for editors and MCP clients. It runs an autonomous agent loop over your codebase — reading, searching, editing files, and running commands — while keeping you in the loop about what it is actually doing.
Getting started
The quickest way to try it is a prebuilt download — no toolchain required:
- Grab the latest build from the Releases page:
- macOS:
Code-Assistant-macos-aarch64.app.zip(Apple Silicon) orCode-Assistant-macos-x86_64.app.zip(Intel) - Linux:
code-assistant-linux-x86_64.zip - Windows:
code-assistant-windows-x86_64.zip
- macOS:
- Launch it. On first start, code-assistant opens its Settings screen. Pick a provider (there are one-click suggestions for the common ones), paste an API key, and choose a model — that's it.
- Add your project folder from within the app and start a chat.
No hand-editing of JSON files required to get going. (You still can, if you prefer — see the Configuration guide.)
Build from source instead
# Install the Rust toolchain (macOS/Linux)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
# On Linux (Debian/Ubuntu), install the system libraries gpui needs:
sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
pkg-config build-essential libssl-dev libzstd-dev \
libfontconfig-dev libwayland-dev libx11-xcb-dev \
libxkbcommon-x11-dev libasound2-dev libvulkan1
# On macOS, install the metal toolchain:
xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain
# Clone and build
git clone https://github.com/stippi/code-assistant
cd code-assistant
cargo build --release
The binary lands at target/release/code-assistant. See the
Configuration guide for building a self-contained
macOS .app bundle.
What makes it different
A handful of things we care about:
- A UI you can actually follow. Instead of a terse "Called 5 tools", code-assistant shows which tools ran and what each of them handed back to the model as context. When it goes off the rails, you can see why.
- Format-on-save that stays token-efficient. When your project auto-formats code, an agent's mental picture of a file goes stale and its follow-up edits start failing for non-obvious reasons. code-assistant runs your formatter and then reconciles the model's own edits with the formatted result — without wasting tokens on re-reading files. See docs/format-on-save-feature.md.
- Transparent file encoding & line endings. It reads a file however it is stored (encoding, BOM, CRLF/LF), gives the model clean text, and writes it back the way it was — so it never silently rewrites your line endings.
- Searches and reads documents, not just code. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and more are consumed automatically as Markdown, so you can point the agent at real-world documents alongside your source.
Features
From the project's README.