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< GEN ✦ />

Open-source AI coding assistant for the terminal

Release Go Report Card Go Reference License

An open-source AI coding assistant for the terminal built with Go. Multi-provider LLM support, event-driven multi-agent orchestration, and full compatibility with Claude Code extensions, plugins, and project instructions.

Features

  • Multi-provider — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Moonshot, Alibaba, MiniMax — switch with /model
  • Tools & MCP — Built-in tools (Edit, Bash, Glob, Grep, WebSearch, etc.) + MCP integration
  • Skills, Subagents & Plugins — Claude Code compatible format, marketplace install
  • Event-driven multi-agent — Parallel agent execution with decoupled event-based coordination
  • Hooks — Lifecycle extensibility via shell, LLM, agent, or HTTP hooks
  • Session — Auto-persist, resume, fork, auto-compact
  • Performance — Minimal context injection, fast response, low token consumption
  • Other — Prompt prediction, configurable thinking effort, scheduled loops, permission control, etc.

Providers

Provider Models Environment Variables
Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6 ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or Vertex AI
OpenAI GPT-5.2, GPT-5, o3, o4-mini, Codex OPENAI_API_KEY
Google Gemini 3 Pro/Flash, 2.5 Pro/Flash GOOGLE_API_KEY
Moonshot Kimi K2.5, K2 Thinking MOONSHOT_API_KEY
Alibaba Qwen3.5 Plus, Qwen3 Max/Plus/Flash, QwQ, DeepSeek-V3/R1 DASHSCOPE_API_KEY
MiniMax M2.7, M2.7 Highspeed, M2.5, M2.5 Highspeed, M2.1, M2.1 Highspeed, M2 MINIMAX_API_KEY

Installation

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yanmxa/gencode/main/install.sh | bash

Re-run to upgrade. To uninstall:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yanmxa/gencode/main/install.sh | bash -s uninstall
Other methods

Go Install

go install github.com/yanmxa/gencode/cmd/gen@latest

Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/yanmxa/gencode.git
cd gencode
go build -o gen ./cmd/gen
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin && mv gen ~/.local/bin/

Usage

# Interactive mode
gen

# Non-interactive mode
gen "explain this function"
cat main.go | gen "review this code"

# Resume previous session
gen --continue        # Resume most recent
gen --resume          # Select from list

Quick Start

  1. Run gen to start interactive mode
  2. Use /model to connect a provider and select a model
  3. Start chatting!

Commands

/model /tools /skills /agents /mcp /plugin /compact /think /search /loop /resume /fork /clear /init /memory — type /help for details.

Keyboard: Shift+Tab toggle permission mode, Ctrl+O expand tool details, Ctrl+C cancel, Ctrl+D exit.

Configuration

GenCode stores configuration in ~/.gen/:

~/.gen/
├── providers.json    # Provider connections and current model
├── settings.json     # User settings (permissions, hooks, env)
├── skills.json       # Skill states
├── projects/         # Project-scoped session transcripts + indexes
├── skills/           # Custom skill definitions
├── agents/           # Custom agent definitions
├── commands/         # Custom slash commands
└── plugins/          # Installed plugins

Project Instructions

Place a GEN.md (or CLAUDE.md) in your project root to provide project-specific instructions. These are automatically loaded into the system prompt. Project-level settings can also be placed in .gen/settings.json.

Benchmark: GenCode vs Claude Code

Compared with Claude Code v2.1.112 on Apple Silicon, same model (claude-sonnet-4-6):

Metric GenCode Claude Code Advantage
Download size 12 MB 63 MB (+ Node.js 112 MB) 5x smaller
Disk footprint 38 MB 175 MB 4.6x smaller
Startup time ~0.01s ~0.20s 20x faster
Startup memory ~32 MB ~189 MB 5.8x less
Simple task ~2.4s / 39 MB ~10.4s / 286 MB 4.3x faster, 7.3x less memory
Tool-use task ~3.3s / 39 MB ~26.0s / 285 MB 7.9x faster, 7.2x less memory

Both tools have comparable features (hooks, skills, plugins, session, MCP, etc.). The performance gap comes from Go's native compilation, minimal architecture design, and lean prompt engineering — vs Node.js V8/JIT/GC runtime overhead.

See full details: docs/benchmark-gencode-vs-claudecode.md

Related Projects

  • Claude Code — Anthropic's AI coding assistant
  • Aider — AI pair programming in terminal
  • Continue — Open-source AI code assistant

Contributing

Contributions welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

Apache License 2.0 - see LICENSE for details.