A from-the-ground-up coding agent inspired by Recursive Language Models (Zhang, Kraska & Khattab, 2025). Works with any text-based model.
Vis takes a fundamentally different approach from current coding agent harnesses. Instead of accumulating messages into an ever-growing context window — then desperately compacting when it overflows — Vis treats the context as an external environment the model interacts with through code. The model writes Clojure, a sandboxed interpreter executes it, and results flow back as a compact journal. State lives in named vars and a SQLite DB, not in the token budget.
No compaction. No sliding windows. No "summarize the last 50 messages". The model sees exactly what it needs: the previous iteration's results, a var index of everything it has defined, and system nudges. Everything else is one function call away.
| Rationale | Why code-eval over tool-calls. Why SCI. What we learned. |
| Architecture | How the layers fit together |
| Iteration Flow | Step-by-step: message to answer |
| Extensions | How to extend the agent with tools and nudges |
| Database | Entity tree and SQLite schema |
Any change to source code that affects architecture, environment shape, extension spec, iteration flow, or public API MUST be accompanied by an update to these docs in the same commit. If docs and code diverge, code wins — fix the docs immediately.