smoke

README

smoke

About

Smoke is my attempt at an agentic coding assistant. It is tailored to my needs, and is best viewed as a hobby research project. To avoid creating a poor simulacrum of other existing coding assistants, I have not allowed myself to install or use any others up until this point. While I have taken inspiration from various sources such as Thorsten Ball's How to Build an Agent blog post, I have used only smoke to directly help me build smoke. This likely means that I am missing features considered table stakes in the broader coding assistant space, but this is by design.

The raink tool described in this blog post was the direct inspiration for my /rank command. My implementation is incomplete, but I still find it useful.

If people discover this repo and express interest in using smoke, I might write a more helpful README in the future. The code is quite messy in some places, documentation is sparse to nonexistent, and there are likely many bugs. Caveat emptor.

Motivations

• I wanted to better understand LLM tool use
• This seemed like a fun project to pursue while I was between jobs
• I doubted that existing tools would have established insurmountable moats after only a few months of existence
• If I were to take claims about the massive future importance of these tools at face value, it seemed absurd to let others decide how I could use them
• Conversations between Dax and Adam on @TerminalDotShop's YouTube channel about their experience building opencode suggested to me that creators of these tools are often just watching each other and copying popular features. I felt that this would lead them all to take similar approaches when that might not be warranted
  • To be clear, I am not criticizing opencode, and I look forward to taking it for a test drive myself. I simply agree with much of their skepticism about the breathless online discourse around these tools. They're not magic, and it is refreshing to hear people with skin in the game say as much
• Pure hubris

CLI Usage

NAME:
   smoke - Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

USAGE:
   smoke [global options]

VERSION:
   v0.0.1

DESCRIPTION:
   An agentic coding assistant primarily focused on the Go programming language. It only works on one directory at a time, and that directory must contain a .git subdirectory.

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --help, -h     show help
   --version, -v  print the version

   LLM Configuration

   --max-tokens int, -t int       The max tokens to return in any given response (default: 8192) [$SMOKE_MAX_TOKENS]
   --model string, -m string      The provider's model to use, or an alias for it [$SMOKE_MODEL]
   --provider string, -p string   One of the following: chatgpt, claude, grok [$SMOKE_PROVIDER]
   --temperature float, -T float  The temperature value to use with the model (default: 1) [$SMOKE_TEMPERATURE]

   Local Configuration

   --debug, -D                    Enable debug logging. (default: false) [$SMOKE_DEBUG]
   --dir DIRECTORY, -d DIRECTORY  The DIRECTORY where your project lives. [$SMOKE_DIRECTORY]
   --session NAME, -s NAME        The NAME of the session, which will be used to derive the log file and plan file names (default: "session") [$SMOKE_SESSION]

   Providers

   --anthropic-api-key string  The API key for Anthropic. Required when provider is "claude" [$ANTHROPIC_API_KEY]
   --openai-api-key string     The API key for OpenAI. Required when provider is "chatgpt" [$OPENAI_API_KEY]
   --xai-api-key string        The API key for xAI. Required when provider is "grok" [$XAI_API_KEY]

Example invocation

smoke -D -t 8192 -T 1 -d . -p grok -m code

Example config file

Smoke will create a config file in ~/.config/smoke/config.json if one does not already exist. The API key fields do not actually do anything at this point. It is primarily useful for defining MCP servers. The default config file contains a fake MCP server that you'll want to delete.

{
  "providers": {
    "anthropic_key": "",
    "openai_key": "",
    "xai_key": ""
  },
  "mcp": {
    "servers": [
      {
        "name": "gopls",
        "command": "gopls",
        "args": ["mcp"],
        "enabled": true,
        "allowed_tools": ["go_*"],
        "denied_tools": [],
        "plan_tools": ["go_*"],
        "env": null
      }
    ]
  }
}