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Show HN: Ante, a coding agent in a single binary that runs offline
- plainviewinstru 1mo agothis would go very hard with a lightweight gui
- ubermon 1mo agoyes, the goal is to perfect the `ante serve` so it is easy to build gui. We are building one internally to test the protocol version
- ubermon 1mo agoHi HN, I'm Mohan from Antigma Labs. Ante is a coding agent that ships as one self-contained ~15MB binary: the TUI, an embedded ripgrep, local PDF/OCR, and a natively managed llama.cpp engine are all inside. No runtime dependencies, no node_modules, no account. - Ante installs a pinned, checksum-verified official llama.cpp build matched to your machine (Metal on Apple silicon; CUDA, Vulkan, or CPU on Linux) and handles upgrades when the pin changes. - It discovers GGUF files already on disk (~/.ante/models, the llama.cpp and Hugging Face caches), attaches to llama servers already running on local ports, and estimates RAM/VRAM from model size and context window before anything loads. - `ante --offline-model /path/to/model.gguf "prompt"` boots the server, runs the session, and shuts it down. `/offline-mode` does the same interactively; `ante serve --offline-model` loads a model once for many clients. - No API key, no account. Once the model is on disk, inference needs no network at all; set ANTE_TELEMETRY=off and no telemetry is exported either. On capability, we'd rather publish the number than oversell: we benchmark local models with the same harness and auditable runs as frontier ones, and Qwen3.6 27B (a 17 GB download) scores 56.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 across 445 trials (live results: https://antigma.ai/eval https://antigma.ai/eval). That's a real gap from frontier models. The design bet is that you mix: hosted providers and local live in the same catalog, `/providers` switches mid-session, so sensitive repos or high-volume work go local and hard problems go frontier. Hosted models work with your own keys or subscription. But nothing about trying Ante requires signing up for anything: download the binary, point it at a GGUF. Offline mode is under active development and has rough edges with the overview at https://ante.run/local/overview https://ante.run/local/overview. I'll be in the comments.
- nazgulsenpai 1mo agoNot sure why this was dead but I vouched. It would be nice if telemetry was opt-in, otherwise this looks awesome and can't wait to try it!
- ubermon 1mo agowill add those soon!
- majorchord 1mo agoOpt-out telemetry is a hard no for me, sorry.
- stronglikedan 1mo agoRight? How hard is it to just ask a single opt-in question during installation. Opt-out just seems lazy, especially if I have to dig though configs to get to it.
- nextblock 1mo agoAgreed! When a tool is explicitely marketed for offline use, opt-out telemetry feels especially contradictory. Should Definitely be opt-in by default...
- ubermon 1mo agofeedback received, it was carry over from the preview dev build.
- abdullahk0634 1mo ago[dead]
- niutech 1mo agoWhy not make it Actually Portable Executable using Cosmopolitan Libc, like Llamafile, to make it run on Windows/Linux/MacOS? Why don't you support Windows with CUDA?
- swrrt 1mo agoHow good is it to work on building games, compared to existing agents? I am building my own game?
- 1bpp 1mo agoYou aren't building your own game if you have a chatbot do it for you.
- stronglikedan 1mo agoThat's like saying you aren't building a house if you use a hammer to drive nails instead of your hand. AI is just a tool like any other, and you use it to build things like you would any other tool.
- throw_m239339 1mo ago> That's like saying you aren't building a house if you use a hammer to drive nails instead of your hand. AI is just a tool like any other, and you use it to build things like you would any other tool. A coding agent is more like a carpenter, a mason, an electrician,... rather than a hammer in that case.
- bigfishrunning 1mo agoI'd say it's closer to a Roomba then a hammer -- if you just let a Roomba run around your living room, can you say you vacuumed?
- simlevesque 1mo agoWell, you tell your Roomba "clean the floor" but you don't ask an AI "make a game". You give it very specific instructions.
- finghin 1mo agoSpecific compared to writing procedural code> Barely even by analogy, IMO One could even argue what defines AI instructability is heuristics as opposed to specifics
- NitpickLawyer 1mo agoLinking to a github repo for a binary release (no source code related to the agent that I could see) is a bit iffy IMO. You should clarify your intentions or link to something else. Might confuse folks.
- adastra22 1mo agoLinking to a binary is iffy from a security perspective. Linking to a GitHub repository is exactly what HN should do.
- swiftcoder 1mo agoA GitHub repo with no source code is exactly equivalent to linking the binary directly
- ubermon 1mo agothere are so much content and valuable stuff in the github repo you can pretty much recreated with your own agent.
- OleksandrC 1mo agoI will leave this here: https://usehax.dev/ https://usehax.dev/ GitHub repo: https://github.com/OleksandrChekhovskyi/hax https://github.com/OleksandrChekhovskyi/hax This is a coding agent implementation I am working on, which delivers what this promises (at least on the "lean" part), except it's actually fully open source, and even more lean (few MBs of runtime memory usage). MIT-licensed, written in C, multi-provider / multi-model, minimalist approach to system prompt and tools (think kinda like pi, but with a bit more "batteries included", like subagents and background tasks out of the box), polished presentation, inspectable (usable transcript view), etc.
- ubermon 1mo agonice, good to see more contributor in this space
- 1mo ago
- _pdp_ 1mo agoConsidering that ripgrep, git, and, you know, other dev tools are part of the toolbox, then why ship them inside this executable? And, furthermore, if you ship them, then why stop there?
- ubermon 1mo agoso it is more for being self contained and works out of box if being deployed in a bare linux environment. we tried shell out to `rg` it didn't work very well and instead spending time handling the args parsing and jugging string output, we decided to spend time on building Grep natively for agent. It is just a start~ as for why stop here yep, the goal is to be able to find the best sweet spot in being self contained v.s. all-in-one bloat ware. for example, we still use a bundled `tmux` skill for the orchestration.
- abdullahk0634 1mo ago[dead]
- jhgik798 1mo agono source code
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- h2hprotocol 1mo ago[flagged]
- relaunchdpt26 1mo ago[flagged]
- messh 1mo agoI understand that claude-code takes a lot of memory and that's bad. However, harneses are simple loops, in theory should take very little memory even if written in python or typescript. See for e.g. pi agent
- ubermon 1mo agoI love pi and share many vision and value with it. But my view on harness is that it is to capturing the structural mechanism with llm interacting the world. They are a dynamic duo evolving together. The technical depth will continue to grow (e.g. /goal being the new primitive, multi-agent collaboration is basic need) Yes the core part is a simple loop, but we have all built toy compilers, inference engine, browsers (it is just a curl command eth) etc. The core algorithm is supposed to be simple. Had a discussion recently: https://x.com/NoCommas/status/2086568454434537710?s=20 https://x.com/NoCommas/status/2086568454434537710?s=20
- queisoy 1mo ago[flagged]
- ubermon 1mo agoI wonder my self, was notified by a friend, but I am grateful.. Probably because of the Meta's open model release?
- thih9 1mo ago> We care about the harness, not the model or the prompts. I wonder if this is a viable approach; after all frontier model providers are betting on the opposite. Then again, they bundle their harness and offer subsidiary pricing - so maybe they themselves aren’t sure if models are as important.
- ubermon 1mo agomy view on harness is that it is to capturing the structural mechanism with llm interacting the world. They are a dynamic duo evolving together. The technical depth will continue to grow (e.g. /goal being the new primitive, multi-agent collaboration is basic need) So it is here to stay. And it is just our focus as we don't have enough resource (yet) to improve the model and I think prompts belong to the user. Had a discussion recently: https://x.com/NoCommas/status/2086568454434537710?s=20 https://x.com/NoCommas/status/2086568454434537710?s=20
- gumby 1mo ago> “while taking the time to figure out how open source should work in the agentic era” I can’t even guess what this means
- ubermon 1mo agogenerally the challenge now is that 1. how to deal with PR spams by AI bots 2. how to make the project sustainable especially when one has no distribution. when anyone can insta remix and re-package and re-sell your hard work. For knowledge sharing open source it is ok, but if you are serious about what you built, this is question needs to be answered first before make it a true community effort.
- ubermon 1mo agothere are still many bad players in the industry, i wouldn't mind sharing it with trusted group. But I am not yet strong enough with deal and handle all those yet.
- anthonyskipper 1mo agoI have bad news for you. No matter what you do here it is probably not sustainable. Competing commercially with people who have so much more resources and ability to build is not sustainable. If it's open source you need adoption, and shouldn't care if people want to steal and remix your work as that will drive more adoption. But from a fellow engineer's perspective we don't need another commercial solution in this space. Every major tech vendor is working on harnesses, and we will get ones that will run circles around yours for free. The open source ones that get popular will have mit/freebsd/etc permissive licenses. (or no one will adopt them) But coming at it from the angle you are indicates you haven't reasoned well about this. Please don't hurt yourself and those around you by starting a startup on this idea.
- ubermon 1mo agocalled out the most asked questions - where is the source - telemetry opt-in/opt-out in README of https://github.com/AntigmaLabs/ante https://github.com/AntigmaLabs/ante
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kunaaldhawan1 1mo agoWow. Great concept!
- angry_octet 1mo ago"Is there telemetry? Yes, and it is opt-out: set ANTE_TELEMETRY=off" Opt-out every time is unacceptable. If you opt out once it should be enough. One accidental execution path without the right environment and you're spewing telemetry to spaghetti knows where.
- layer8 1mo ago> One accidental execution path without the right environment and you're spewing telemetry to spaghetti knows where. That would also be true with opt-in by environment variable, though.
- angry_octet 1mo agoTrue, it would be better to have a mandatory policy in a system location like /etc, would could over-ride environment if specified, and a command line option to show telemetry status. But accidental omission is more likely than accidental opt-in.
- npodbielski 1mo agoso it is just llamafile with few additional application in bundle?
- ubermon 1mo agoit is more like an actual harness with a managed and pinned llama the control is inverse. Harness is compute and Model is data
- felixlu2026 1mo ago[dead]
- max-privatevoid 1mo ago> Is there telemetry? Yes, and it is opt-out Fuck you. Will there ever be a decent agent where the answer to this is "No"?
- modelhub_dev 1mo ago[flagged]
- openflow 1mo ago[flagged]