ax

ax is an open-source analytics harness and agent orchestration tool developed by Necmttn. Designed to operate alongside CLI coding assistants like Claude Code, ax collects, ingests, and analyzes coding agent session telemetry to provide visibility into LLM usage, routing efficiency, and operational costs. In day-to-day use, ax acts as both a CLI utility and an agent enhancement plugin. It stores agent session events locally using an embedded DuckDB backend, enabling engineers to inspect interaction traces, identify candidate savings across model tiers, and run retrospective queries on agent spending without relying on cloud-hosted dashboards. It also supports team-level synchronization of custom skills and reviewer agents via local repository configuration. What sets ax apart is its focus on retrospective repricing, prompt/model routing analytics, and team rig sharing. Rather than functioning simply as another text generation interface, ax measures real-world agent execution paths, quantifies optimization opportunities across model routing strategies, and enforces schema and review guardrails locally. ax is available as open-source software under its GitHub repository. It operates entirely on local infrastructure with zero required network calls for its core data querying pipeline.

Tags: agent harness, ai agent, cli, coding agent, developer tools, OpenSource

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Key features

  • Local DuckDB Telemetry Store — Ingests and queries agent session traces locally without external network dependencies. - Spend & Candidate Savings Analytics — Evaluates historical agent runs to calculate potential savings from model routing adjustments and token optimizations. - Team Rig Synchronization — Syncs shared skills and agent definitions (.ax/skills and .ax/agents) directly across a engineering repository. - Claude Code Plugin Integration — Exposes native plugin actions like ax:setup and ax:retro directly within the Claude Code runtime. - Diagnostic Health Checks — Includes built-in ax doctor tooling to validate ingestion pipelines, schema compatibility, and environment setup. - Routing Tuning Workflows — Automates cost-sorted analysis to identify redirectable spend across interaction classes.

Use cases

Use Case: Agent Spend and Routing Optimization Engineers run retrospective analytics across multi-day agent execution logs to detect over-provisioned model routing. By measuring redirectable spend against historical runs, teams can tune agent orchestration rules to switch to lighter models where high-tier reasoning is unnecessary.

Use Case: Synchronizing Shared Agent Rigs Across Teams Repository maintainers define shared sub-agents and domain-specific skills in the version-controlled .ax/ folder. Developers execute ax team sync to activate standard reviewer agents (such as schema checkers) directly into their local agent environments.

Use Case: Post-Mortem Session Analysis with Claude Code Developers integrate ax via the .claude-plugin system to run ax:retro workflows directly in the terminal after long-running refactoring tasks. This identifies schema registration gotchas, CI failure patterns, and command execution traces for review.

Who it is for

ax is built for software engineers, tech leads, and platform teams heavily using terminal-based coding agents (such as Claude Code) who need local cost telemetry, routing analysis, and shared team configurations. It is not intended for non-technical users or teams looking for an all-in-one proprietary cloud agent platform.

Install guide

Installation Install ax using the official installation script or as a Claude Code skill package: bash # Standard install script curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Necmttn/ax/main/install.sh | bash # Or add via the skills CLI for Claude Code npx skills add Necmttn/ax

First Run Run the built-in diagnostic tool to verify the local DuckDB ingestion pipeline and runtime configuration: bash ax doctor To synchronize project-specific skills and agents into your local environment, execute: bash ax team sync

Example Session Analyze historical session costs and evaluate candidate model routing savings over the last 30 days: bash # Run retrospective routing analytics ax retro --days=30 # Inspect recent agent session telemetry ax query "SELECT session_id, model, tokens_in, tokens_out, cost_usd FROM sessions ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 10;"

Part of CLI Coding Agents

Categories: AI Coding Agents, Code Assistants, Developer Tools

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