radin

🐀 radin

A backlog and an agent harness for people who watch their token bill.

"Radin" is French slang for a miser. Hence the rat.

Your subscription has a limit. A long agent session hits it by Tuesday. radin is for the person who would rather ship than upgrade the plan.

It works with Claude Code, Codex CLI and opencode. It has two parts.

1. A backlog that outlives the conversation. Tasks and epics are files in your repo. You record a bug or an idea mid-session and come back to it later.
2. A harness that works the backlog cheaply. A small router plans a task, hands it to a fresh sub-agent, reviews the diff, and commits. One task, one commit. A run resumes where it stopped.

The harness keeps the expensive context small. A stack of token-saving tools handles the rest. radin installs that stack and wires it into your host.

Why it costs less

• The router holds ids and exit codes. It never reads your code.
• Each sub-agent starts empty and sees one task. No context carries over from task to task.
• Ordering, status and merging run in a CLI. No model call pays for them.
• The cheaper model runs fact-finding only. Every execution task runs on sonnet.
• rtk and caveman cut command output and agent prose. Their figures are in the tool stack. They are upstream's claims, not ours.

Run /radin-stats to see what each tool saved on your machine.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shortcuts/radin/main/install.sh | bash

With Rust 1.88 or newer, install with cargo instead, then run the installer:

cargo install --git https://github.com/shortcuts/radin --locked
radin install

You need curl, tar, bash and the CLI of each host you pick. Add -s -- --yes to accept every default. Update, repair and uninstall: docs/install.md.

Pick hosts with --only. Each row installs one host:

<url> is the install.sh URL in the first command. Pass a comma list to install several hosts: --only claude,codex.

Without --only, a terminal runs a step-by-step wizard (hosts as a checkbox list, models, package manager) and Left or Backspace goes back one step. claude starts ticked. Without a terminal, the installer installs claude only.

Per-host details: Codex, opencode.

Claude migration: the first install after this change moves ~/.claude/.radin to ~/.radin. Restart open Claude sessions.

Use it

Record, plan, execute, review. Each skill runs in your own conversation, so it can ask you questions.

install.sh --wave-cap N sets the most tasks /radin-batch runs at once (default 2, kept by radin update). RADIN_WAVE_CAP overrides it for one run. Parallel work needs the worktree answer yes.

A task has a category (feat, fix, chore, refactor), an optional priority and dependencies, and can sit under an epic. Every field and key: docs/reference.md.

The harness

/radin-batch and /radin-do run the same loop. It follows the orchestrator-workers pattern: a thin router drives, and sub-agents work.

• A small router. It holds ids, titles and exit codes. A worker reads the task, the plan and the code, then returns one STATUS: line.
• One worker, one task. Each worker starts with an empty context and sees only what its task needs.
• A verify loop. The worker checks its own diff and retries a failed check three times. One review gate at the end of the session reviews every commit and files its findings as new tasks.
• Just-in-time plans. radin lints each plan and writes it against the tree as it is now.
• Model by role. The cheaper model runs fact-finding only. Every execution task runs on sonnet.
• State on disk. Interrupt a run at any point and the next run picks up from there.
• The CLI does the deterministic work. Ordering, status and merging are code, not prompts.

Why it works this way: docs/how-it-works.md. Diagrams: docs/agents/lifecycle.md.

The tool stack

radin does not rebuild what a good tool already does. It installs each tool below, configures it, and names it in the loop. It forks none of them.

Run /radin-stats to see what each one saved on your machine. Caveats on unpinned fetches and config repair: docs/how-it-works.md.

Documentation

Contribute

CONTRIBUTING.md covers tests and measurements.

For agents

AGENTS.md holds the rules for agents that edit this repo. Design rules and flow diagrams live in docs/agents/. Human docs stay in docs/.