Zene

A minimalist, high-performance AI coding engine written in Rust.

Zene is a headless AI coding agent designed to understand your codebase and execute complex programming tasks. It acts as an intelligent backend that can be integrated into CLI tools, IDEs, or other agentic workflows via standard JSON-RPC.

� Philosophy

Zene combines "Zen" and "Engine".

Zen: Minimalist, focused, and distraction-free. We avoid bloated frameworks to provide a pure coding flow.
Engine: High-performance, reliable, and powerful. Written in Rust to be the robust core driving your intelligent agents.

We believe in:

Single Binary: No complex runtime dependencies.
Explicit Configuration: No magic, just standard environment variables.
Agentic Composition: Specialized roles (Planner, Executor, Reflector) working in harmony.

�🚀 Key Features

Model Agnostic: Built on llm-connector, supporting OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, and more.
Context Aware: Uses tree-sitter for syntax-level code analysis and efficient file walking to understand project structure.
Safe Execution: Features an OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) loop with "Dry Run" capabilities and atomic file operations.
JSON-RPC Server: Functions as a standard server, exposing its capabilities to IDEs and other tools.
Blazing Fast: Written in pure Rust with async I/O.

📦 Installation

Prerequisites

Rust toolchain (cargo)

Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/lipish/zene.git
cd zene
cargo build --release

🛠️ Usage

1. Set Environment Variables

Zene prioritizes DeepSeek but supports OpenAI as a fallback.

2. High-Performance Knowledge (Opt-in)

To enable Tier 3 Semantic Memory (RAG), you must compile Zene with the knowledge feature:

cargo build --release --features knowledge
export ZENE_USE_SEMANTIC_MEMORY=true

2. Run a Task (One-Shot)

Execute a single instruction directly from the command line.

# Create a file
cargo run -- run "Create a hello.txt with content 'Hello Zene'"

# Refactor code (Context aware)
cargo run -- run "Refactor src/main.rs to extract the CLI logic into a separate module"

# Fetch Web Content
cargo run -- run "Fetch https://example.com and summarize it in README.md"

3. Server Mode

Start Zene as a JSON-RPC server (over Stdio). This mode supports persistent sessions and multi-turn conversations.

cargo run -- server

JSON-RPC API Example

Request (Start Session):

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "agent.run",
  "params": {
    "instruction": "Analyze the project structure",
    "session_id": "my-session-001"
  },
  "id": 1
}

Request (Follow-up):

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "agent.run",
  "params": {
    "instruction": "Based on that, generate a README",
    "session_id": "my-session-001"
  },
  "id": 2
}

Sessions are automatically persisted to ~/.zene/sessions/<session_id>.json.

📚 Documentation

Detailed documentation is available at zene.dev (or in the www/ directory):

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read our architecture documentation to understand the core philosophy before submitting PRs.

📄 License

MIT

zene 0.4.4