Hax is a minimalist, native CLI coding agent created by Oleksandr Chekhovskyi. Written in C and designed for POSIX-compliant environments, it provides terminal-based automated development workflows with an emphasis on low overhead, speed, and standard Unix behavior across Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. In practical usage, Hax operates from the shell to orchestrate multi-step code generation, file editing, and command execution tasks. It gathers contextual instructions from repository files such as AGENTS.md and integrates with standard LLM backends—including local inference servers like llama-server—to execute tool calls, run shell subcommands, and track session state. What sets Hax apart from other coding agents is its hyper-lightweight system architecture. While many agents require multi-megabyte Node.js or Python runtimes that consume significant memory, Hax is optimized for tiny private memory footprints and minimal execution latency. It also adheres to cross-agent standards by discovering tools in .agents/skills and standard XDG configuration paths. Hax is an open-source project hosted on GitHub and available under an open-source license.
Tags: ai agent, cli, coding agent, OpenSource, terminal