crude

Crude — the hackable Agentic Development Environment

An ADE for humans and agents. Both first-class. Neither in the other's way.

Our ambition: the first environment built around agentic development, not an agent bolted onto an editor. Humans and agents deserve equal respect.

Crude is an opinionated, open-source Agentic Development Environment (ADE) written in Go. It brings AI coding agents, your editor, terminals and review tools into one terminal-native workspace on Linux and Windows. Use your mouse or keyboard: click, drag, browse menus, or take a shortcut when it helps. It's 2026; you shouldn't need to memorize a thousand keybindings to get work done.

Documentation · Releases · Report a bug · Apache-2.0

Active development / beta testing. Crude and its agents can change files and execute commands. Bugs, incompatible changes, or agent mistakes can damage or lose work. Commit your changes, keep independent backups, review actions, and do not rely on Crude as your only copy. Installers require explicit acceptance.

Less configuring. More developing.

Crude gets out of your way — and your agents' way. Useful defaults, discoverable controls, one coherent workspace. No endless editor-plugin configuration.

• Agents with a workspace: multi-agent delegation, plans, reports, shared project memory, and recoverable interrupted work.
• An IDE you can stay in: editor, LSP integration, file search, split panes, floating windows, and native Linux PTY / Windows ConPTY terminals.
• Review before trust: Git diffs, staging and history, permission controls, managed worktrees, and Local History previews/undo. Not a security sandbox.
• Your models and tools: configurable provider accounts, local models, Skills and MCP integrations. Bring your own account; provider charges may apply.
• A retained core: shells attach to long-lived workspace actors. Closing a shell detaches it; it does not deliberately terminate running agent work.

Deliberately no editor plugin system. Want a different workflow? Fork or clone Crude, run it from source, and ask Crude itself to implement the change. Skills and MCP connect your agents to tools; they aren't an editor-plugin treadmill.

Real product captures of this repository. The example conversation is served by a local screenshot fixture, not a claim of a live model's output.

Install or update

Download the latest release.

Open a fresh terminal, run crude in your project, and add a provider account in Tools → Settings → Accounts. Select its model under Agents. Use the menus and bottom panels to explore — Ctrl+Alt+P opens commands and Alt+F12 opens the terminal if you prefer shortcuts.

Opinionated by design

For the intended look: current Kitty or Alacritty on Linux, Windows Terminal on Windows, truecolor, and JetBrainsMono Nerd Font NF — not NFM. Install the font, select it in your terminal, then enable Nerd font and Show file icons under Settings → IDE → Interface. The installers warn about missing or unverifiable setup, but never change fonts or terminal settings for you. Ask Crude: “Help me set up the ideal Crude terminal; explain each change and ask before making it.”

Build from source

Use the Go version in go.mod, Zig 0.16.0 and Git. Linux also needs a C compiler, libc headers and tic (ncurses). The terminal library is pinned and linked with cgo.

make libghostty
. scripts/libghostty_env.sh
go run .

Windows: run scripts/bootstrap_libghostty.ps1, dot-source scripts/libghostty_env.ps1, then go run . in PowerShell. make build produces a standalone Linux binary. When hacking on Crude inside Crude, use a separate CRUDE_HOME profile so your development core doesn't disturb your working one.

Humans and agents welcome

The source is documented for agents to hack on as readily as humans. Start with AGENTS.md for repository rules, the documentation index for architecture and contracts, and validation for test/lint/design/performance gates.

License: Crude's original code is Apache-2.0. Third-party code retains its own licenses; see NOTICE, Codex attribution and the notices bundled with releases. LICENSE-MIT is retained for upstream material, not an alternative license for Crude.