Claurst is an open-source, multi-provider terminal coding agent written from scratch in Rust. It began as a clean-room reimplementation of Claude Code’s behavior and has grown into a full TUI pair programmer with its own plugin system and personality — quickly passing 10,000 stars on GitHub and reaching a v0.2.0 beta that the author considers stable enough for daily driving.
Claurst is a standalone agent, not a wrapper theme: it runs its own agent loop with tool use, file editing, and terminal commands inside a rich terminal UI. It routes between providers — Anthropic with prompt caching and adaptive thinking, OpenAI/Codex with subscription-token support and reasoning replay, Gemini, and others — under one retry and context-compaction policy. Sessions support chat forking, memory consolidation across conversations, and a companion named Rustle. It can also run as an ACP (Agent Client Protocol) agent, so editors that speak ACP can drive the same engine. Despite the playful name and mascot, the engineering is serious: one consistent compaction and retry policy applies across providers, so switching models mid-project does not change how the agent behaves.
Free. Claurst is open source under the GPL-3.0 license. You only need your own model access — an existing Claude or ChatGPT subscription, or API keys from a supported provider.
Developers who like terminal-first AI pair programming but want provider freedom and a fast native binary instead of being locked to a single vendor’s CLI and model lineup.