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jcode

Rust coding-agent harness built for footprint: ~28MB per session vs 140-390MB for Codex/Claude Code, instant boot, optional local embeddings — made for running many sessions in parallel.

12,746 1,410 Rust MITupdated today

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Curator's take

The RAM numbers are the whole pitch and they only matter at multiplex scale — at 10 concurrent sessions the gap vs OpenCode is 260MB against 3.2GB, and that's when you care. Single-session users won't feel it. 'The most intelligent harness' is self-published benchmarking (jcode.sh/bench) — treat it as marketing until third-party numbers exist. When NOT: if you live off one ecosystem's plugins and skills (Claude Code, Codex), the megabytes you save don't buy back the integrations you lose.

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README.md

jcode

The most RAM efficient harness
The most most intelligent harness

Website · Docs · Benchmarks · Features · Install · Quick Start · Further Reading · Contributing

Installation

# macOS & Linux
curl -fsSL https://jcode.sh/install | bash

# Windows 11 (PowerShell 5.1+)
irm https://jcode.sh/install.ps1 | iex

Need Homebrew, source builds, provider setup, or want an agent to set it up for you? Jump to detailed installation.

Performance & Resource Efficiency

jcode is built to be as performant and resource efficient as possible. Every metric is optimized to the bone, which is important for scaling multi-session workflows. Here we sample a few metrics to show the difference: RAM usage and boot up.

RAM comparison

1 active session

Tool	PSS	Comparison
jcode (local embedding off)	27.8 MB	baseline
jcode	167.1 MB	6.0× more RAM
pi	144.4 MB	5.2× more RAM
Codex CLI	140.0 MB	5.0× more RAM
OpenCode	371.5 MB	13.4× more RAM
GitHub Copilot CLI	333.3 MB	12.0× more RAM
Cursor Agent	214.9 MB	7.7× more RAM
Claude Code	386.6 MB

Continue your stack

What teams reach for next — and why each earns a place beside jcode. Ranked by curator confidence.

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tau

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Why it fitsBoth are lean open coding agents rejecting harness bloat: tau is a minimalist Python port of Pi with TUI and skills; jcode is a Rust binary optimized to the byte — pick Python hackability or raw footprint.

mini-swe-agent

The 100-line agent from the SWE-bench team: >74% on SWE-bench Verified with no tools but bash, no config sprawl — the reference minimal harness, adopted by Meta, NVIDIA and Ramp.

Why it fitsTwo minimalisms: mini-swe-agent is pedagogical — 100 lines, bash only, read it in one sitting; jcode is engineered — full harness features with the resource profile of a grep.