Building Effective AI Coding Agents for the Terminal: Scaffolding, Harness, Context Engineering, and Lessons Learned
The landscape of AI coding assistance is undergoing a fundamental shift from complex IDE plugins to versatile, terminal-native agents. Operating directly where developers manage source control, execute builds, and deploy environments, CLI-based agents offer unprecedented autonomy for long-horizon development tasks. In this paper, we present OPENDEV, an open-source, command-line coding agent written in Rust, engineered specifically for this new paradigm. Effective autonomous assistance requires strict safety controls and highly efficient context management to prevent context bloat and reasoning degradation. OPENDEV overcomes these challenges through a compound AI system architecture with w...
| Authors | Nghi D. Q. Bui |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 5 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 March 2026 |
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