Smelt is an open-source, Rust-based terminal AI coding agent developed by Leonard Cser. Designed for command-line developers, it provides an interactive terminal user interface (TUI) paired with an extensible runtime engine to assist with codebase navigation, code generation, and developer automation tasks. Operating directly in the terminal, Smelt features a responsive TUI that handles agent prompt execution, status monitoring, and background task animations. Under the hood, Smelt incorporates a dedicated runtime and a Lua scripting engine, enabling developers to interact with the agent interactively or orchestrate multi-step automated skills through custom scripts. Smelt distinguishes itself through its native Rust implementation, prioritizing low resource overhead, robust grapheme/unicode rendering in terminal emulators, and deep scriptability via a documented Lua API. This modular architecture allows developers to define custom agent behaviors and triage skills directly in repository configuration folders. Smelt is an open-source project distributed publicly on GitHub, free to clone, build, and adapt to custom development workflows.
Tags: ai agent, cli, coding agent, developer tools, terminal