KAISEN

A terminal coding agent. It lives in your shell, not in a browser tab: it reads your files, writes them, runs commands, checks the output, and keeps going until the task is actually done.

pip install kaisen
kaisen

What it is

• A single self-contained binary with a full-screen terminal UI - no runtime, no node_modules, no daemon.
• Real execution. The agent runs commands in your working directory and reads their true stdout/stderr; it never tells you to go run something yourself.
• Cards for every step: each command, file read and file write is shown, folded, with its real output attached.
• A daily token meter, per-turn token counts, and session titles.

First run

The agent asks for a Kaisen API key. Create one at kaisen.qzz.io/api - it looks like sk-kaisen-.... It is stored in ~/.kaisen/config.json with 0600 permissions and sent only to kaisen.qzz.io.

Models

Switch with /model. Reasoning depth is /effort (low, medium, high, max) - higher effort keeps working through more steps before it answers.

Commands

/help /model /effort /clear /reset /retry /run <cmd> /cwd /copy /keys /sid /about /exit

/run is yours, not the agent's: it executes a command directly and shows the output without spending a turn.

Platforms

Prebuilt wheels: Linux (x86-64, arm64), macOS (Intel, Apple silicon), Windows (x64, arm64). Anywhere else - Termux, Alpine, BSD - pip install kaisen fetches the fallback wheel, which compiles the bundled Go source once on first run into ~/.kaisen/bin/ and needs a Go 1.22+ toolchain.

Billing, usage and keys: kaisen.qzz.io