Rexo Code v0.9 brings a provider-agnostic AI coding agent to the terminal in Rust

Rexo Code, an open-source AI coding agent written in Rust and designed to run in the terminal, has been released at version 0.9. In a post on dev.to, developer Daksh Saboo describes the project as the result of a long-running experiment to understand how coding agents actually behave once they start interacting with a real codebase.

What Rexo Code can do

According to the dev.to announcement, the agent is built to work through a project rather than simply forwarding a prompt to a model API. It can search and analyse a codebase, read and edit files, execute shell commands, inspect the results of those commands, and decide what to do next based on what it finds.

Beyond that core loop, the tool supports MCP tools, session management, skills and custom commands, hooks and plugins, and subagents. It can also accept image input, stream responses as they are generated, and run in a headless mode that outputs JSON, a mode that points to scripting and automation use cases. The project currently supports Windows, Linux and macOS.

Permissions before sensitive actions

A recurring theme in the announcement is safety. Saboo writes that he did not want an agent that blindly executes everything it decides to run, especially on a real system, so Rexo Code asks for user permission before carrying out sensitive actions. The agent can then review command output and continue working once it has the results.

The development process itself, he notes, followed a repeated cycle of building something, testing it, breaking it, figuring out why, and rebuilding it, with plenty of bugs and architectural changes along the way.

A provider-agnostic design

The decision not to tie Rexo Code to a single AI provider was deliberate. Models change quickly, providers change their APIs, and different developers have different requirements, the post explains. The agent is therefore built so that users can choose the models and providers that fit their own workflow, rather than being locked into whichever vendor happens to ship the tool.

Built with AI, tested by hand

Saboo also acknowledges that Claude and Claude Code were used extensively while developing Rexo Code, for debugging, implementation, refactoring and working through larger changes across the Rust codebase. He emphasises that he still tested the changes himself and decided what actually belonged in the project, iterating on real results rather than accepting generated code as-is.

Version 0.9 is described as the release the author is comfortable distributing more widely. The project is free and open source, with its code hosted on GitHub under the author's account.

Why it matters

Terminal-based AI coding agents have become a familiar part of the developer tooling landscape, but many are tied to one vendor's models or subscription. An open-source agent written in Rust that deliberately separates the agent layer from the model layer gives teams a way to keep their tooling stable while the underlying AI market keeps shifting. Features such as permission prompts, hooks, plugins, subagents and headless JSON output suggest a tool intended for serious and automated use rather than casual experimentation. At v0.9, with the author openly inviting feedback on what features are still missing, Rexo Code is an early but substantial entry in the open-source coding agent space, and one worth watching for developers who want provider choice in their terminal workflow.