A clean-room Claude Code rebuild, written in Rust by AI agents

What it does

Claurst is a terminal-based coding agent built in Rust that pairs with you inside a TUI. It supports multiple LLM providers and can run headless or integrate into editors via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP). The project aims to reproduce Claude Code’s behavior as an open-source alternative, minus the tracking and telemetry.

The interesting bit

The project was born through a two-phase clean-room process: one AI agent analyzed Claude Code’s source to produce an exhaustive behavioral spec, then a second AI agent implemented that spec in idiomatic Rust without ever referencing the original TypeScript. The README cites Phoenix Technologies v. IBM to underscore the legal hygiene, which is either admirably cautious or aggressively paranoid, depending on your taste.

Key highlights

• Clean-room Rust reimplementation of Claude Code’s behavior, built from AI-generated specs rather than source code
• Multi-provider routing so you aren’t locked to a single model
• ACP-compatible: plugs into Zed, Neovim, and JetBrains as a subprocess agent
• No tracking or telemetry
• Experimental features include chat forking, session sharing via GitHub Gists (/share), free-tier access (/connect), and multi-turn objective tracking (/goal)

Caveats

• Beta v0.1.4 with acknowledged rough edges on experimental features like /share, Free Mode, and /goal
• The “Free Mode” is described by the authors themselves as “as good as free gets you,” so expectations should be modest

Verdict

Developers who want a hackable, privacy-respecting terminal agent with multi-provider flexibility should try it. If you need a polished, zero-config enterprise tool, this beta is probably not your ride.