I built a free autonomous coding agent for your terminal — bring your own API key

#Adamya Singh Shengar — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 05:38:33 +0000

I got tired of paying $20/month for AI coding tools. So I built my own.
Codeably is an autonomous coding agent that runs in your terminal. You bring your own API key — so it costs you $0 to run.
What it does
You describe a task in plain English. It figures out what to do and does it:
bashcodeably "add JWT authentication to the express app"
codeably "write unit tests for every function in src/utils.js"
codeably "find and remove all dead code"
codeably "fix the race condition in payment.js"
codeably clean # scan + remove dead code automatically
codeably review # AI code review of your git changes
codeably chat # open a full terminal chat UI
It runs a loop — Observe → Think → Act → Verify → Done — until the task is finished.
Try it now (no install needed)
bashnpx codeably "your task here"
Or install globally:
bashnpm install -g codeably
7 providers — most with free tiers
You plug in your own key. Here's what's available:
ProviderModelFree tierGroqLlama 3.3 70B✅ 14,400 req/day FREEGeminiGemini 2.0 Flash✅ 1,500 req/day FREEOllamaCodeLlama (local)✅ unlimited FREE offlineOpenRouter100+ models✅ free models availableAnthropicClaude Sonnet 4$5 credit on signupMistralMistral Largefree trial creditsOpenAIGPT-4opay per use
I personally use Groq for daily work — it's fast, free, and the Llama 3.3 70B model is genuinely good at code.
⚡ Type cb instead of codeably
One-command shortcut setup:
macOS / Linux / WSL:
bashbash install-shortcut.sh
source ~/.zshrc
cb "your task"
Windows PowerShell:
powershell.\install-shortcut.ps1
. $PROFILE
cb "your task"
Terminal chat UI
bashcodeably chat

or

cb chat
Opens a full chat UI right in your terminal:
╭────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ >/< codeably chat │
│ groq · llama-3.3-70b-versatile │
│ type /help for commands │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

❯ explain how async/await works

Async/await is syntactic sugar built on top of Promises...

❯ /switch ← switch provider mid-chat
❯ /history ← see conversation history
❯ /save ← save chat to file
❯ /clear ← start fresh
❯ _
Supports markdown rendering, conversation history, and live provider switching with /switch.
30 tools
File I/O, shell commands, git operations, code search, dead code detection — 30 tools total. A few highlights:

patch_file — safe string replacement (no full rewrites)
grep_replace — find and replace across multiple files
git_commit — stage all and commit with a message
confirm_delete — always asks before deleting anything
detect_language — auto-detects your project's stack
run_script — write and execute multi-line bash

Safety first
Codeably cannot delete files without your explicit approval. Every deletion goes through confirm_delete:
⚠ Deletion confirmation required
Reason: unused file, zero imports detected

Files to delete:
- src/old-utils.js
- src/deprecated/auth.js

Delete these 2 file(s)? [y/N]:
How it's built
No frameworks. No LangChain. No magic.
~900 lines of vanilla Node.js. One OpenAI-compatible client that works with all 7 providers. A simple loop. 30 tool definitions.
codeably/
├── codeably.js ← CLI entry + all commands
├── runtime/
│ ├── agent.js ← Observe-Think-Act loop
│ ├── client.js ← unified LLM client
│ └── context.js ← codebase snapshot
├── tools/
│ └── index.js ← all 30 tools
└── ui/
├── renderer.js ← terminal UI
└── chat.js ← terminal chat UI
Real examples
bash# Add features
codeably "add rate limiting — 100 req/min per IP"
codeably "add input validation to all API endpoints"
codeably "add TypeScript types to all files in src/"

Clean up

codeably clean
codeably "remove all console.log from src/"
codeably "migrate from callbacks to async/await in api.js"

Tests

codeably "write integration tests for the auth routes"
codeably "add error boundary tests to the React components"

Refactor

codeably "split the 400-line UserController into smaller files"
codeably "extract all hardcoded strings into a constants file"

Review + docs

codeably review
codeably docs
Why I built this
Every AI coding tool I tried had the same problem — you're paying a subscription for access to a model you could call directly yourself. The tool is just a wrapper.
So I wrote the wrapper. It took about a week. Now I use it daily and it costs me nothing because Groq's free tier is more than enough.
The goal was always: bring your own key, own your agent.

GitHub: https://github.com/adamyasingh-05/Codeably
Install: npm install -g codeably
Would love feedback — what features would make this more useful for your workflow?Content1783184623221_files.zipzip1783184623221_codeably-v1_1_0 (1).zipzip1783184623222_codeably-v1_1_0.zipzip

DEV Community: #Adamya Singh Shengar

I built a free autonomous coding agent for your terminal — bring your own API key

or

Clean up

Tests

Refactor

Review + docs