vix

About

vix targets the cost and latency tax that coding agents pay when every phase re-reads the same codebase. Instead of specialized subagents, one stem agent carries a generic system prompt and receives phase-specific instructions as user messages, so exploration history stays cached and reusable when the same session moves into planning and execution. A tree-sitter virtual filesystem minifies code as it is read, cutting context tokens by a reported 20-50%, and workflows defined in JSON chain agent, bash, and tool steps with branching and parallelism. Benchmarked against Claude Code on seven real tasks, vix was about 47% cheaper and 40% faster overall. It targets terminal-first developers on macOS and Linux who bring their own API keys.