Coder

Delegate coding to supervised subagents of any model from your favorite harness.

Why Coder

• Cross-harness. One runtime, every host. The same subagents and models from Claude Code, Codex and more.
• Cross-model. Codex, Claude, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or local models. Pick per task.
• Clean context. Your conversation stays about intent and orchestration; implementation details live in the subagents.
• Fast dispatch. Handoffs are instant, and light enough to spin up a large number of subagents at once.
• Steerable tasks. Full visibility into every task, from live progress to mid-run course corrections.
• Unified permissions. Three modes across all engines: Read-only, Workspace-write, and Auto.

Get started

1. Install into your host.

Claude Code - from inside a session:

/plugin marketplace add muzam1l/coder
/plugin install coder@coder-plugins
/reload-plugins
/coder:setup

Or from the shell:

npm install -g @wular/coder
coder setup-host claude

Others - Codex, Pi, OpenCode, and anything else that reads the Agent Skills standard dir (~/.agents/skills):

npm install -g @wular/coder
coder setup-host agents

2. Connect at least one engine. Either an engine CLI, logged in, to use that subscription:

npm install -g @openai/codex && codex login
# and/or
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code && claude auth login

Or a local/provider model of your own (see Bring your own model). coder setup-host checks what's ready.

3. Ask your host to use it:

Use Coder to explain the directory structure of the workspace.

Or make it the default in AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md:

Always use Coder for all implementation and system exploring tasks.

Recommended setup: Claude Code as host (fable low/medium) and Codex (terra) as engine - best for performance and cost distribution.

Configuration

Machine defaults live in ~/.coder/config.json; a coder.config.json in a repo overrides per project.

{
  "chain": ["codex", "claude", "custom"],
  "agents": {
    "codex": { "model": "terra", "effort": "high", "permissions": "auto" },
    "claude": { "model": "opus", "effort": "medium", "permissions": "auto" },
    "custom": { "model": "qwen" }
  },
  "models": {
    "qwen": { "baseUrl": "http://localhost:11434/v1", "model": "qwen2.5-coder:32b" }
  }
}

Staying up to date

coder upgrade

Updates the CLI through whichever package manager installed it and refreshes the host plugins to match. See coder upgrade --help for narrowing flags. Set CODER_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 to silence the update notice.

Advanced usage

You rarely need these - the host agent drives tasks itself - but everything is scriptable:

coder run "<text>"                     # dispatch a task (--wait to block for the answer)
coder list                             # list running tasks (--all for running & stopped)
coder result [task-id]                 # status + final answer (--wait blocks until done)
coder task steer <task-id> "<text>"    # continue a task with new instructions
coder task stop <task-id>              # interrupt it
coder task stream [task-id]            # watch the live progress log
coder task approve <task-id> <appr-id> # answer an escalated permission (--deny)

Any [task-id] defaults to the most recent task.

Full docs: coder --help.