What we built in 2 weeks @ zerostack - rocketup - blog on (almost) anything

tldr Ship fast + break and repair + interact with the community

What is zerostack?

zerostack is a minimal coding agent written in Rust, optimized for memory footprint (~20MB of RAM, optimized for low-end devices, parallel agents and cloud platforms) and performance (0% CPU usage when idle), inspired by the UNIX philosophy.

zerostack ships different innovative features to try to compete with the more mainstream CLI coding agents:

A better, redesigned permission system split in 5 modes (Restrictive, ReadOnly, Guarded, Standard and YOLO), integrated with prompts and with sandboxing

Integrated Ralph Wiggum loops via /loop

Integrated Git Worktrees with auto-merge support and --parallel for agent-managed worktrees

Introduced ARCHITECTURE.md, an hybrid between AGENTS.md and Memory that acts as a 1-file core reference for all AI agents

Shipping with the Custom Prompts, an alternative to Skills, and the Prompts Library, our alternative to superpowers

zerostack v1.0.0 was released on the 17th of May, and it was met by positive feedback from Hacker News: today, we want to show what was build in the last two weeks.

What did we do in 14 days?

In chronlogical order:

Added max_agent_turns to control the agent’s turn

Added support for local models via Ollama and empty API keys

Added ACP support

Added ARM64 builds

Added terminal resizing logic

Added chat history with arrowkeys support

Added Ctrl+G to edit the user message in an external editor

Added Quick Models via /models

Added themes support

Redesigned authentication logic

Added Emacs-style keybindings

Implemented lazy loading for all memory-heavy elements

Added support for using .TOML as config files

Added support for ~/.config for storing config files

Added cost tracking

Added /prompt autoconfig, an integrated agent for configuring zerostack

Implemented --parallel and other worktree-based CLI flags for flexible workflows

Implemented an experimental edit tool based on this antirez’s article

Fix CRLF bug

Fix path traversal bug

Implemented safer permission checker

Added /btw and /undo, inspired by Claude Code

Added ability for Prompts to set what Permission Mode it wants to run in

Added ! to run slash commands

Added . to quickly switch between prompts

Implemented Memory support (only in preview releases)

Implemented Subagents support (only in preview releases)

Implemented ARCHITECTURE.md support (only in preview releases)

What do we want to show?

We wanted to show that the new paradigm in the AI agents era is to build fast, ship faster, and keep listening to your community: non-trivial issues and pull requests should always be resolved in less than 24 hours, and even when you are not building you have to keep thinking on how you can improve your projects in order to adapt to the userbase.

Also, I wanted to write a short note on the amount of lines often shipped in vibe coded tools: even if you want to ship lots of features, you still need to focus on clean code, even if the codebase if fully agent-built, in order to improve human reviews and agent performances: our codebase is currently ~16k LoC, while other equivalent agents sit at around ~75k to ~150k LoC.

What is coming next?

We are going to ship:

v1.4.0 w/ Memory and Subagent

VSCode, Zed and JetBrains extensions

Hooks via JSON RPC and via shell scripts

Workflows & Macros

Agent Interfaces via UNIX sockets

Optimized prompts

Follow us on Github in order to recieve updates from us.

Happy building,<br>Giuseppe Della Vedova @ zerostack