Codewhale

An open source coding agent for your terminal — bring your own model.

Codewhale started as a native experience for DeepSeek. It has since grown into a community-driven project: one coding harness that fits a growing international community and supports as many models and providers as possible — open models first, hosted or local, none privileged over the rest.

Give it a provider, a model, and a task. It reads your code, edits files, runs commands, and checks its own work, then stops when the job is done or it needs you. Switch models mid-task with /model. Work interactively in the TUI, or run codewhale exec in scripts and CI. It's written in Rust, licensed MIT, and runs on your machine.

We're always looking for contributors and ways to improve. If a model or provider you use is missing, or something breaks, telling us is one of the most useful things you can do — see Contributing.

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Install

npm install -g codewhale

Cargo, Docker, Nix, Scoop, prebuilt archives, Android/Termux, and a CNB mirror for anyone who can't reach GitHub are covered in docs/INSTALL.md. Coming from deepseek-tui? Your config and sessions carry over — see docs/REBRAND.md.

Use

codewhale auth set --provider deepseek   # or export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, etc.
codewhale                                # open the TUI
codewhale exec "fix the failing test"    # headless
codewhale web                            # local browser client on 127.0.0.1

In the TUI: /model switches provider and model together, /fleet runs a team of workers, and /restore undoes a turn. When the composer is idle, Tab cycles Plan / Act / Operate and Shift+Tab cycles the Ask / Auto-Review / Full Access permission posture. ! runs a shell command through the normal approval path.

What it does

• Any model, any provider. DeepSeek, Claude, GPT, Kimi, GLM, and 30+ providers, plus your own vLLM, SGLang, or Ollama with no key — all through one runtime and one toolset. Context limits and prices come from the real route, and an unknown price shows as unknown rather than $0.
• Read-only until you allow more. Plan mode can't change files, and approvals gate risky commands. When an OS sandbox actually wraps a command, Codewhale says so: Seatbelt on macOS where available, opt-in bubblewrap on Linux. A repo's constitution.json compiles into write holds that even Full Access can't skip.
• Work you can resume. A fleet records every step to an append-only ledger, so fleet resume picks up where you left off.

Learn more

• docs/PROVIDERS.md — every provider route: hosted, gateway, and local
• docs/FLEET.md — fleets, the ledger, and resume
• docs/CONFIGURATION.md — config.toml, hooks, and the constitution
• docs/AUTHORIZATION_ORDER.md — how modes, hooks, permission rules, safety floors, repo law, approvals, and sandboxing compose
• docs/HOOKS.md — the eleven TUI lifecycle hook events, their payloads, and which three of them can steer a turn (codewhale exec and the CLI subcommands do not fire hooks)
• docs/WEB.md — the loopback-only browser client and its one-time authentication boundary

Everything else — modes, keybindings, sandbox details, MCP, the runtime API, and architecture — lives in docs and on codewhale.net.

Contributing

Issues, PRs, repro steps, logs, and feature requests are all real project work, and first contributions are welcome. When a PR can't merge as-is, maintainers harvest what works and keep the author credited — in the commit, the changelog, and docs/CONTRIBUTORS.md.

• Open issues — good first contributions live here
• CONTRIBUTING.md — dev setup and PR flow
• docs/CONTRIBUTORS.md — everyone who has shaped this
• Buy me a coffee

Thanks to DeepSeek for the models and support that started the project, DataWhale 🐋 for welcoming us into the Whale Brother family, and OpenWarp and Open Design for collaborating on the terminal-agent experience.

License

MIT. An independent community project, not affiliated with any model provider.