README.md

(dpc's) Tau coding agent

Tau is like Pi, but twice as much.

Tau is a minimal Unix-first coding agent for people who want local control, simple process boundaries, and tooling that fits naturally into a command-line environment.

Tau runs its main components as standalone POSIX processes and connects them over stdio and Unix sockets.

Components include:

• UI
• Harness
• LLM provider integration
• Extensions

This architecture has important benefits:

• Starting a component is just running a process — supervise, sandbox, restart, or swap it for anything else that speaks the protocol.
• Components can be system-provided, which pairs well with technologies like NixOS.
• Components can be sandboxed individually using tools like bubblewrap, Docker, jails, or Landlock, according to their actual needs.
• Components can be implemented in any programming language.
• It avoids bringing in web technology where it does not belong.

Features

See FEATURES.md for a tour of the major features.

Sister-projects

Patchmark is a diff-aware language server for Markdown and plain-text review notes. It pairs nicely with Tau's prompt-editing flow: open your prompt in $EDITOR, review diffs with language-server help, and leave precise feedback for agents without leaving your normal editing environment.

Status: heavy development, daily use

Tau is still under heavy development, but it has been a productive daily driver for its developers for weeks. It already has features and design choices that are stronger than those in popular coding agents, while the Unix-centric UX keeps improving quickly.

Recent overview video: The State of Tau #1.

Terminal demo:

Installing

via Nix

Tau exposes a Nix flake and can be started with nix run github:dpc/tau.

You can also import it as a flake input.

via cargo

Tau is a Rust project and can be installed directly from Git:

cargo install --git https://github.com/dpc/tau tau

via other means

Official packaging will come later — request a format or upvote existing requests on GitHub Discussions to help prioritize.

Configuration

Use tau init to generate config files.

Use tau provider login chatgpt to enable the built-in ChatGPT/Codex provider; edit harness.yaml for harness-owned roles, defaults, and extension settings.

By default, tau starts the harness daemon and the CLI UI.

To explore other entry points, run tau -h.

Contributing & Contact

• Discord server
• #support:dpc.pw Matrix channel
• Rostra p2p social network profile
• GitHub Discussions — questions, ideas, general conversation
• Security policy — private vulnerability reporting and trust-boundary notes
• I don't want your PRs anymore — I do not accept pull requests

License

Mozilla Public License 2.0

Other agents named Tau

Because the author is not very original and forgot to do prior research, and Tau is just such a good name, there are other coding harnesses called "Tau", like:

• https://github.com/tau-agent/tau - CLI, in Rust, probably quite similar
• https://taulepton.com/
• https://github.com/AbdoKnbGit/tau
• https://alexledger.substack.com/p/tau-the-self-modifying-browser-based

Get used to it, I guess. Now that we can all be so productive, we'll have forks and personal re-implementations of everything, with conflicting names.

When you want to be specific, you can call this one "dpc's Tau coding agent".

AI usage disclosure

I use LLMs when working on my projects.

Because of its nature, this project is more AI-assisted than most of my other work.