crow-cli
crow-cli is a stateful ACP-native coding agent.
What we didn't build
| Permissions | The agent has the same access you do. You trust it or you don't run it. |
| New protocol | We use ACP. No new data model for agent-client interaction. |
| Offline agent | Every agent has web_search and web_fetch and is prompted to use them liberally. |
Skills
We ship a public skill catalog — reusable, versioned workflows that every agent can
fetch and install on demand. Browse it at
crow-ai.dev/docs/skills or start from the
machine-readable index at /llms.txt;
an agent with an empty skill directory is prompted to pull exactly what the task needs.
Got a workflow worth sharing?
Open a PR
to add to them today.
Client
crow-cli speaks the
Agent Client Protocol
— LSP for agents. That means it runs in
any ACP client,
so bring whichever editor you already live in.
Our preferred client is our fork of Zed (setup guide). To be abundantly clear: we have no affiliation with Zed Industries. Zed is an independent open-source editor, and our fork is just one of many ACP clients on the market — we borrowed their editor and wired our agent into it.
| Transparent | Every agent works in the open. Tool calls, thinking, and decisions are all rendered live in the editor. |
| Cancellable | Fine-grained supervision and control through cancellation. |
| Orchestration | Conditional loop engineering. Agents manage their own task loops, delegate to other agents, and control exit conditions — theirs and others'. |
Install crow-cli and Crow ADE
$ curl -fsSL crow-ai.dev/install.sh | bash
Copy and paste into a terminal to install our ACP agent and client.
Loop Engineering
Crow's orchestration tools allow agents to manage their own loops as well as to create task lists for other agents — delegating work to the future so our crow-cli agents can operate indefinitely.
UI is telemetry
Every action of the agent is rendered live in the chat panel. You watch the agent think, decide, and act, letting you course-correct in real time.
Thomas Wood
I'm CTO at Phytomech. I write about what I'm building at advanced-eschatonics.com.
Crow and crow-cli are free and open source. I built them because I got rug pulled by multiple subscription based agents in the span of a year. This is what I use now. Bring your own keys, bring your own models, own the infrastructure. Fork it. Rebrand it. MIT licensed.
Huge thanks to Zed and JetBrains for ACP, SidenAI for Sidex, and OpenHands for the system prompt.
