Code Assistant

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:

1. Grab the latest build from the Releases page:
   • macOS: Code-Assistant-macos-aarch64.app.zip (Apple Silicon) or Code-Assistant-macos-x86_64.app.zip (Intel)
   • Linux: code-assistant-linux-x86_64.zip
   • Windows: code-assistant-windows-x86_64.zip
2. 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.
3. 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