Introducing Croo

A coding agent with a frog in it. Now on your desktop.

Croo started as a tiny terminal agent. It has grown into a small, quiet desktop app for working with AI on your code, and it now lives at ai.crooli.com.

Coding agents have become powerful, and often large: accounts to create, backends to trust, and a lot happening out of sight. Croo takes the opposite approach. You bring your own API key, or a local model. You decide what the agent may do on its own. And you see everything it does.

This part of the story is interactive. See it on crooli.com.

This part of the story is interactive. See it on crooli.com.

Chat and Code

Two icons at the top of the sidebar switch modes. Code lists your project folders, each with its own chat history, and lets the agent read, search, edit and run things inside that folder. Chat is a plain conversation with no folder and no tools, for when you only want to think out loud.

You set the leash

Pick how much Croo may do. Manual asks before everything. Auto runs reads, edits in the folder and known-safe commands, and asks about the rest. Bypass never asks. Shift-Tab cycles through them.

This part of the story is interactive. See it on crooli.com.

Every edit shows a diff and every command shows exactly what it will run. Approve with Command-Return, deny with Escape. Add an AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md or CROO.md to a project and Croo reads it every turn; /init studies the project and writes one for you.

Git, built in

A Git panel sits beside the chat: your branch and sync state, every changed file with its +/− counts, inline diffs, and checkboxes to pick what goes into the commit. Commit, push and pull without leaving the window. No remote yet? Publish connects one by URL, or creates the repository on GitHub with gh. When something fails, Croo explains it in plain language instead of dumping a stack trace.

Run code from the chat

Shell, Python and Node snippets in a reply get a Run button. Output streams under the block with the exit code and timing, and the button turns into Stop while it runs.

Everything is visible

Reasoning streams into a row you can open, labelled with how long the model thought. A live clock and token count run while the agent works, and each reply ends with its time, tokens and an estimated cost. Claude prices are built in, you can set your own for other providers, and local models are free.

Bring your own model

Use Claude, OpenAI or Google Gemini with your own API key. Or point Croo at anything OpenAI-compatible: OpenRouter, Groq, Together, DeepSeek, Mistral, xAI, or a local model through Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp or vLLM. The model picker lists what your key can actually use, and the Effort control appears only for models that have one.

This part of the story is interactive. See it on crooli.com.

Keys are encrypted with your OS keychain before they are written to disk. Croo works with API keys and compatible endpoints. It does not use anyone's consumer-subscription logins.

Fully local

Croo has no accounts, no telemetry, and no backend. Your chats and configuration stay on your machine, and the only network calls go to the provider you chose.

And the small things

Paste or drop images and files into the message box, or type @ to mention a file from your project. Press Command-K to search chats by what was said, files by name, and actions. Open a real terminal with Command-J, browse files with a viewer that wraps long lines, and preview what you build in the built-in browser. Edit any message and resend it, or retry the last reply. A system notification tells you when a task finishes or needs your OK while Croo is in the background.

And the frog. It breathes, blinks, hops while tools run, catches flies, falls asleep, and reacts when things go well or badly. Click it.

Get Croo

Croo runs on macOS today, with Windows next. Download it from ai.crooli.com, or build it from source:

git clone https://github.com/xandertaylorx/croo && cd croo
npm install
npm run dev

On first launch you can pick a provider and paste a key, or choose Just look around for a scripted demo with no key at all. Croo is not notarized yet, so macOS may ask you to confirm the first launch under System Settings, Privacy and Security.

Croo is free and MIT licensed. Read the code, report issues, or send a pull request on GitHub, or see the Croo page for the full overview.