There are many coding agents, but this one is
(dpc's) Tau is a process-oriented LLM coding agent harness built for command line nerds and Linux hackers.
Tau builds on top of the most venerable, powerful, and ubiquitous runtime there is: Unix itself. It embraces the Unix philosophy to its full potential.
It is built by devoted, experienced Unix users who want coding agents to become first-class modern Unix tooling: composable, inspectable, scriptable, and comfortable in the terminal.
Follow Your first Tau task for installation, authentication, one bounded repository change, review, and resume. It explains Tau's trust and local-data boundary before the first model request.
All components (UI, harness, LLM API, extensions) run as standalone POSIX processes, communicating over stdio. No Node. No npm. Just processes, pipes and sockets.
For a tour of concrete features — built-in extensions, key bindings, commands, and configuration — see FEATURES.md.
Extensions are just executables. Write in the language of your choice.
Each component can be individually sandboxed with bubblewrap, Docker, Landlock, or jails—matched to its actual needs.
Running a component on another machine is as simple as prefixing
its command with ssh user@host -c.
Components can be packaged and managed by your OS. Pairs naturally with NixOS, Guix, and traditional package managers.
Ships as one unified binary containing CLI, agent, and built-in extensions. No runtime dependencies.
Native binary that starts instantly and requires very little memory. Initial measurements show just 4MB of memory use.
Typed event logs preserve sessions, agent transcripts, branch trees, rewinds, detach, and resume across restarts.
Configure roles, models, reasoning effort, verbosity, thinking summaries, service tier, and per-role tool access.
Commands, path completion, prompt history, fzf-powered insertion, custom key bindings, and editor-based prompt editing.
Core shell and filesystem tools, web search, notifications, provider backends, and utility tools ship with Tau. PIM and service integrations install as separate executables.
Agents can delegate to isolated sub-agents, message agents or users, and keep long-running tool work in the background.
Inline diffs, reasoning rendering, cache stats, turn stats, policy gates, approval logs, and shell/filesystem access locks keep agent work inspectable.
See the full FEATURES.md for details and configuration examples.
Tau runs most capabilities as process extensions. Standard extensions ship in the Tau repository. External Tau projects are maintained in separate repositories but remain part of the Tau project.
Built-in model providers and provider profile management.
Shell commands, file operations, locking, and image inspection.
Timers, reminders, and opt-in papercut reporting.
Generic web search and URL fetching.
Terminal-facing activity notifications and detached notification commands.
Opt-in trusted local scripting.
These Tau projects are maintained in separate repositories. Published projects are pinned and re-exported by the Tau flake.
Email and calendar tools with approval-gated writes.
Live session projection and task coordination with a Tau Swarm peer.
Bot message bridge with long polling and scoped send/reaction tools.
Relay-only social client with signed writes and opt-in notifications.
Socket Mode text bridge with scoped send/reaction tools.
Bot API text bridge with an optional separately supervised gateway.
Disabled-by-default XMPP messaging integration.
Maintained by akohlsmith, this standalone SearXNG search tool supports configurable engines and categories, with optional local-category prioritization. See the project for installation and configuration.
Third-party extensions are independently maintained. A listing is not a compatibility, security, or maintenance endorsement; review the project before granting it access to Tau.
For external Tau projects, for example:
nix profile install github:dpc/tau#tau-ext-slack.
Installing a package does not enable it, create an account, add credentials,
or authorize routes and tools.
Then configure the service identity, Tau-managed secrets, allowed senders,
routes, and role tool policy. See the
extension guide.
Tau is still under heavy development, but it has been a productive daily driver for its developers for weeks. It already has features and design choices that are stronger than those in popular coding agents, while the Unix-centric UX keeps improving quickly.
There are many big plans ahead: more process-oriented integrations, stronger multi-agent workflows, and Unix-native features no other coding harness has today.
Watch the latest overview: The State of Tau #1.
Terminal recording:
Patchmark
is a diff-aware language server for Markdown and plain-text review notes.
It pairs nicely with Tau's prompt-editing flow: open the prompt in
$EDITOR, review diffs with
language-server help, and leave precise feedback for agents from the editor
you already use.
isolate runs Linux commands through bubblewrap while exposing only project-needed paths. gh-isolate provides sandboxed GitHub CLI access without exposing credentials to the sandbox.
Clank is a simple local task tracker for personal use with coding agents.
Because the author is not very original and forgot to do prior research, and Tau is just such a good name, there are other coding harnesses called "Tau", like:
When you want to be specific, you can call this one dpc's Tau coding agent.