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dreb

An open-source terminal coding agent, forked from pi-mono (itself derived from Claude Code). It has fewer features than Claude Code by design — the bet is that a small, hackable core you can shape beats a large feature set you can't.

Claude Code is a great product. dreb isn't trying to compete on features — it's trying to compete on flexibility. The core is kept minimal; what you'd find baked into other tools, you build here with skills (markdown workflows), extensions (TypeScript), or install from third-party packages.

Concretely, dreb ships without things Claude Code has — and that's intentional:

• No MCP. Build CLI tools with READMEs (Skills), or build an extension that adds MCP support.
• No permission popups. Run in a container, or build your own confirmation flow with extensions.
• No plan mode. Write plans to files, or build it with extensions, or install a package.
• No background bash in the main agent. The main agent runs commands synchronously. For parallel work, use the subagent tool.

What you get in exchange: a skill system, an extension API, custom agent definitions, custom provider support (route through any proxy, use any API-compatible backend), and a subagent system for parallel work. From those primitives, you build what you need.

Quick Start

npm install -g @dreb/coding-agent

Then authenticate and run:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
dreb

Or use a coding subscription (Codex, GitHub Copilot): run dreb then /login.

Or use a custom provider — corporate proxy, Bedrock, local models, anything OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible. See Custom Models.

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/aebrer/dreb.git
cd dreb
npm install
npm run build
npm link -w packages/coding-agent

What's In It

10 built-in tools: read, write, edit, bash, grep, find, ls, web_search, web_fetch, subagent — plus always-active search, skill, and tasks_update.

mach6 — a built-in development workflow covering the full issue-to-merge lifecycle: assess → plan → implement → push → review → fix → publish. Multi-agent code review with 5 specialized agents running in parallel, independent assessment of findings, iterative review-fix cycles, GitHub as shared memory. Inspired by mach10 by Kevin Ryan.

Skills — markdown workflow definitions the agent loads on-demand. Built-in skills ship with dreb; add your own or install third-party ones.

Extensions — TypeScript modules for custom tools, commands, keyboard shortcuts, event handlers, UI components, custom providers.

Sessions — persistent session tree with branching, compaction, and in-place navigation.

Memory — persistent, file-based memory (global + project-scoped) that survives across sessions.

Custom Providers — route any built-in provider through a proxy, add new providers via JSON config or extensions. 20+ providers supported out of the box.

Modes: Interactive TUI, print/JSON CLI, RPC (for process integration), SDK (for embedding in your own apps).

Why Fork?

A hard fork means we control the update cadence. No upstream changes land without us reading the diff first. We cherry-pick what's useful and skip what isn't.

See FORK.md for details.

Packages

Package	Description
packages/coding-agent	CLI tool, built-in tools, skills, sessions, extensions — full docs
packages/telegram	Telegram bot frontend — run dreb as a Telegram bot
packages/ai	LLM provider abstraction — 20+ adapters, OAuth, model discovery
packages/agent	Agent runtime — tool loop, state, streaming, hooks
packages/tui	Terminal UI — differential rendering, markdown, syntax highlighting

License

MIT