What it does

Claurst is a terminal-based AI coding agent that talks to multiple LLM providers (Claude, Gemini, and others) through a Rust TUI. You can run it headless with a one-shot prompt, chat interactively, or plug it into editors like Zed via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP). It handles tool permissions, streams reasoning steps, and can share sessions via GitHub Gists.

The interesting bit

The project started after Claude Code’s entire TypeScript source leaked through an npm sourcemap. The author didn’t copy the code — they ran a two-phase clean-room process: one AI agent wrote behavioral specs from the leaked source, then a separate AI agent implemented those specs in Rust without ever seeing the original. The README cites Phoenix Technologies v. IBM (1984) as precedent. It’s either meticulous legal hygiene or performance art, but the result is a 9.7k-star Rust binary that installs via curl | bash or npm install -g.

Key highlights

• Multi-provider routing: switch between Claude, Gemini, and a “Free Mode” without vendor lock-in
• ACP support: acts as a JSON-RPC agent inside Zed, Neovim, or JetBrains editors
• Chat forking, memory consolidation, and /goal for multi-turn objectives
• No telemetry; runs entirely local except for the LLM API calls
• Cross-platform binaries for Windows, Linux (x86_64 + aarch64), and macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon)

Caveats

• v0.1.4 is officially beta; experimental features (/share, Free Mode, /goal) are flagged as rough
• Voice/microphone support requires ALSA; headless builds need --no-default-features
• The “free” tier’s quality is described as “as good as free gets you :P”

Verdict

Worth a look if you want a Claude Code-like experience without the proprietary wrapper, or if you need an ACP-compatible agent for your editor. Skip it if you need battle-tested stability — the beta label and experimental flags are there for a reason.