Crush
Terminal-based AI coding agent from Charmbracelet, written in Go, supporting many LLM providers.
HN commenters like Crush for its clean, fast terminal UI and single Go binary,123 and for running open or local models across swappable providers.45678 The most cited caveats are defaults that some users patch out, like command blocking and mouse grabbing,910 and subagents that cannot use edit tools.11
Why people recommend it
Open models · 3
Commenters report good results pairing it with open or local models such as Qwen, GLM and DeepSeek.
“Use 3.6 27b as a daily driver for months with charmbracelet crush.”
“Having some success with Qwen+Crush and have been more productive.”
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Provider flexibility · 3
Easy to switch models or providers mid-task and combine with services like OpenRouter.
“Really easy to do with Crush/OpenCode.”
“you can also try different harness such as Crush and Pi”
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“It has the most user-friendly UI of them all, a really usable scroll view.”
Terminal UI · 3
Praised as the most user-friendly and prettiest terminal interface, with a usable scroll view.
“It has the most user-friendly UI of them all, a really usable scroll view.”
“Works better than opencode (pi based) or anything else I have tried for my needs, and by far the prettiest and easiest to reason about”
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“As someone who lives in the terminal the web interface doesn't feel as nice to use as things like aichat, crush, or antigravity-cli.”
Daily driver · 3
Used daily for demanding work including devops, compilers and kernel debugging.
“I patched crush to remove all safetyguards and enable yolo mode by default. I use it on a daily basis including devops.”
“Works better than opencode (pi based) or anything else I have tried for my needs, and by far the prettiest and easiest to reason about”
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“Use 3.6 27b as a daily driver for months with charmbracelet crush.”
Lightweight · 2
Ships as one tiny Go binary without NPM dependencies and runs fast.
“Works better than opencode (pi based) or anything else I have tried for my needs, and by far the prettiest and easiest to reason about”
“It has the most user-friendly UI of them all, a really usable scroll view.”
Hackable · 2
Users patch it to change defaults like themes, yolo mode and prompts.
“I use crush (https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush) with the following patches:”
“I patched crush to remove all safetyguards and enable yolo mode by default. I use it on a daily basis including devops.”
Caveats and dissent
Defaults · 2
Some users patch out default command blocking, safety prompts, mouse grabbing and the project init prompt.
“I use crush (https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush) with the following patches:”
“I patched crush to remove all safetyguards and enable yolo mode by default. I use it on a daily basis including devops.”
Subagent limits · 1
Subagents cannot have edit tools, which limits agent orchestration.
“It has the most user-friendly UI of them all, a really usable scroll view.”
Telemetry, docs · 1
One user found local model support unclear, noted telemetry that must be disabled in config, and disliked a maintainer's handling of an issue.
“Thanks for the recommendation, I took a look”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Qwen 3.8 27B is out: open weights, best local dense model yet 2 mentions
- You only need the frontier model for one single edit 2 mentions
- GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis 2 mentions
- Dots: Always-on agents 1 mention
- GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price 1 mention
- Ask HN: What's the Best Agent Harness? 1 mention
Data: crush.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 18
“When I moved from crush to Zcode”
“I use crush (https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush) with the following patches:”
“you can also try different harness such as Crush and Pi”
“Works better than opencode (pi based) or anything else I have tried for my needs, and by far the prettiest and easiest to reason about”
“Use 3.6 27b as a daily driver for months with charmbracelet crush.”
“As someone who lives in the terminal the web interface doesn't feel as nice to use as things like aichat, crush, or antigravity-cli.”
“I am looking at a Crush client running beside neovim in a herdr session”
“I patched crush to remove all safetyguards and enable yolo mode by default. I use it on a daily basis including devops.”
“It has the most user-friendly UI of them all, a really usable scroll view.”
“Really easy to do with Crush/OpenCode.”
“Crush is pretty nice. It’s become my daily driver for personal projects.”
“I use a coding agent (crush), prompt it to brainstorm an implementation with me”
“I use crush normally.”
“I use crush as coding agent but removed the blocked commands because I also do a lot of system administration. Love it.”
“I'm using crush and have had a good experience”
“you could download a different harness (Crush, OpenCode, Pi etc) and load $5 in credits and test it for yourself”
“Having some success with Qwen+Crush and have been more productive.”
“Thanks for the recommendation, I took a look”