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. |
| Agent skills | Agents are never offline and are encouraged to take whatever they need from the internet. Once a task is accomplished, it's a few memory tool calls away from being reinjected into any session context. No static skill packages. |
Crow ADE
Crow is an Agent Development Environment built on top of crow-cli and Sidex made for concurrent agent orchestration.
| 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. |
| Agent Client Protocol | ACP is LSP for agents, so we built an ACP client into a fork of VS Code. |
| VS Code ecosystem | Same editor, same terminal, same language servers. |
| 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.
