I beat all the popular harnesses on FrontierHarness Eval

An AI coding agent optimized for minimal use of context tokens, while providing a great user experience.

FrontierHarness Eval benchmark result, click here to download report.zip

• index tool - usestree-sitter to parse supported programming languages to produce a high level skeleton of a file, with exact start-end lines of each item (e.g. a function's implementation is in lines 150-165). Encouraged to be used before reads. For my usage it adds 59 tok/turn but saves 224 tok/turn on read calls, saving 165 tok/turn.

• code_execution tool - usesmonty to run an interpreter that has all other tools available as async functions. Maki uses it to filter / summarize / transform / pipe data to other tools as input, without it ever reaching and polluting the context window. Sandbox limited by time & memory.

• task tool - when delegating work to subagents, the AI chooses whether to run weak / medium / strong model of used provider. Think haiku / sonnet / opus.

• System prompt, tool descriptions, and tool examples are all concise, I've made sure not to bloat your context.

• Uses rtk if you have it installed, disable withmaki.setup({ agent = { rtk = false } }) in yourinit.lua . Saves ~50% of bash output tokens. Remember bash is just 12% of total token usage, so 6% is nice, but saving on reads (65% of total) by usingindex gave me more benefit. I think I'll do bash output filtering like this myself in a future release.

• SUPER fast startup, 60 FPS, and light on memory. Not running any JavaScript, using ratatui for TUI. Even the splash screen animation uses SIMD.

• Extend with neovim like Lua plugins - Builtin plugins ,User made plugins showcase ,Lua API reference .

• Philosophy of not hiding anything - while other coding agents hide information as models improve (e.g. not showing number of lines read), maki leaves you in control.

• UI fits everything well on my small screen laptop.

• Full visibility of subagents - each subagent gets their own "chat window" you can easily navigate between using /tasks (Ctrl-X).

• Sensible permission system - when the agent runs git diff && rm -rf / , what do you think will happen in your current coding agent? It will treat it asgit * . Maki uses tree-sitter to parse the bash command and figure out the permissions requested aregit * andrm * . Disable using--yolo .

• SSRF protection on webfetch calls.

• A memory tool to keep long term context, just tell maki to remember something (sometimes it uses it automatically). Managed via/memory (view / edit / delete memories).

• Fuzzy search with Ctrl-F.

• /btw to run a command with the chat history without interfering with the current session.

• Rewind on Escape-Escape (no code rewind yet, only chat history).

• Attach images in prompts.

• 26 of the most popular themes.

• Resume sessions.

• Skills & MCPs.

• Opt-in OpenTelemetry export, same format as Claude Code's.

• Plan mode.

• Run bash commands using ! , or!! if you want maki to not know about it.

• /cd to change dir.

• Use --print --output-format stream-json to run UI-less. Output is compatible with Claude Code, so you can easily replace your existing solutions.

• Anthropic - ANTHROPIC_API_KEY only (using OAuth is against TOS). Bedrock supported viaCLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK=1 .

• OpenAI - OPENAI_API_KEY and OAuth viamaki auth login openai .

• xAI - XAI_API_KEY and OAuth viamaki auth login xai .

• Google - GEMINI_API_KEY .

• Copilot - GH_COPILOT_TOKEN or an existing GitHub Copilot sign-in at~/.config/github-copilot/ .

• Ollama - OLLAMA_HOST for local (e.g.http://localhost:11434 ), orOLLAMA_API_KEY for cloud.

• llama.cpp - LLAMA_CPP_HOST (e.g.http://localhost:8080 ), optionallyLLAMA_CPP_API_KEY .

• Mistral - MISTRAL_API_KEY .

• Z.AI - ZHIPU_API_KEY .

• DeepSeek - DEEPSEEK_API_KEY .

• OpenRouter - OPENROUTER_API_KEY .

• Requesty - REQUESTY_API_KEY . SetREQUESTY_BASE_URL=https://router.eu.requesty.ai/v1 for the EU region.

• Synthetic - SYNTHETIC_API_KEY .

• Regolo - REGOLO_API_KEY . EU-hosted open-weight models.

• TensorX - TENSORX_API_KEY .

• OpenCode Zen - OPENCODE_API_KEY , or the freepublic key for zero-cost models. Models from the models.dev catalog.

• OpenCode Go - OPENCODE_API_KEY . Models from the models.dev catalog.

• Aperture - APERTURE_HOST (e.g.https://your-host.tailnet.ts.net ). No API key needed, Tailscale handles auth.

Dynamic providers - drop an executable script into ~/.config/maki/providers/ to add custom providers or proxies. See docs for details.

Providers as Lua plugins WIP!

curl -fsSL https://maki.sh/install.sh -o install.sh
cat install.sh

chmod +x install.sh && sh install.sh

One-liner:

curl -fsSL https://maki.sh/install.sh | sh

Installs to ~/.local/bin. Override with MAKI_INSTALL_DIR.

irm https://maki.sh/install.ps1 -OutFile install.ps1
Get-Content install.ps1

.\install.ps1

One-liner:

irm https://maki.sh/install.ps1 | iex
curl -fsSL https://maki.sh/install.sh | sh

Both install to %LOCALAPPDATA%\maki and add it to your user PATH. Override with MAKI_INSTALL_DIR / $env:MAKI_INSTALL_DIR.

cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/tontinton/maki.git maki
nix run github:tontinton/maki

Or download a pre-built binary from GitHub Releases.

Run maki acp or configure your ACP supporting editor to use maki, e.g. in Zed's settings.json:

"agent_servers": {
  "Maki": {
    "default_config_options": {
      "model": "deepseek/deepseek-flash"
    },
    "type": "custom",
    "command": "maki",
    "args": ["acp"],
    "env": {}
  }
}

More info at the official docs.

tontinton/makiconf - includes a semble tool (Lua code) for semantic code search, and an ast-grep MCP server for AST-based search and replace.

DISCLAIMER: >90% of code in maki was written by maki, guided by humans. Some parts of the code are not as good as what I would've made in the artisanal hand-made style. But it's also not slop / vibe coded, and can easily be refactored if needed nowadays.