tau

There are many coding agents, but this one is

Unix-native

(dpc's) Tau is a process-oriented LLM coding agent harness built for command line nerds and Linux hackers. Like Pi, but twice as much.

View on Radicle View on GitHub Learn more

Why Tau?

The power of Unix

Tau builds on top of the most venerable, powerful, and ubiquitous runtime there is: Unix itself. It embraces the Unix philosophy to its full potential.

Architecture

Processes over plugins

All components (UI, harness, LLM API, extensions) run as standalone POSIX processes, communicating over stdio. No Node. No npm. Just processes, pipes and sockets.

┌─────────┐ unix socket ┌───────────┐ │ cli │───────────────────│ harness │ └─────────┘ └─────┬─────┘ ┌─────────┬────┼────┬─────────┐ stdio stdio stdio stdio ┌───┴───┐ ┌───┴───┐ ┌───┴───┐ ┌───┴───┐ │ agent │ │ tools │ │ ext │ │ ext │ └───────┘ └───────┘ └───────┘ └───────┘
┌───────┐ │ cli │ └───┬───┘ │ unix socket ┌────┴────┐ │ harness │ └────┬────┘ │ ├── agent (stdio) ├── tools (stdio) ├── ext (stdio) └── ext (stdio)

Benefits

What Unix gives you

For a tour of concrete features — built-in extensions, key bindings, slash commands, and configuration — see FEATURES.md.

$ Language agnostic

Extensions are just executables. Write in the language of your choice.

# Native sandboxing

Each component can be individually sandboxed with bubblewrap, Docker, Landlock, or jails—matched to its actual needs.

@ Remote execution

Running a component on another machine is as simple as prefixing its command with ssh user@host -c.

& Native packaging

Components can be packaged and managed by your OS. Pairs naturally with NixOS, Guix, and traditional package managers.

~ Single binary

Ships as one unified binary containing CLI, agent, and built-in extensions. No runtime dependencies.

% Low resource use

Native binary that starts instantly and requires very little memory. Initial measurements show just 4MB of memory use.

Sister-projects

Better review notes for agent feedback

Patchmark is a diff-aware language server for Markdown and plain-text review notes. It pairs nicely with Tau's prompt-editing flow: open the prompt in $EDITOR, review diffs with language-server help, and leave precise feedback for agents from the editor you already use.

Philosophy

New tool for an old wizard

Inspiration

Thank you, Pi

Tau owes its design to Pi and aims to copy every single thing that Pi does well, staying as close to its design as possible within a dogmatic Unix philosophy.

Status

Just getting started

Tau is in early development. The core architecture, event protocol, and terminal UI are being actively built.

asciicast

Community

Get in touch

Discord server Matrix chat Rostra GitHub Discussions

Other agents named Tau

Naming is hard

Because the author is not very original and forgot to do prior research, and Tau is just such a good name, there are other coding harnesses called "Tau", like:

Get used to it, I guess. Now that we can all be so productive, we'll have forks and personal re-implementations of everything, with conflicting names.

When you want to be specific, you can call this one dpc's Tau coding agent.