Chad

chad: a local Claude-Code-style coding agent for your laptop

[](https://github.com/nathansutton/chad/actions/workflows/tests.yml)

Claude can do anything, for anyone, anywhere. chad does one thing. 🗿 *Coding under supervision.*

chad is a single-user coding agent that runs entirely on an Apple Silicon Mac via [MLX](https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx). One 27B model and no API key. Every other harness assumes a datacenter on the other end of a socket; chad assumes a laptop, and the whole design falls out of that. (Not affiliated with Anthropic.)

Try it

uvx chad-code          # runs anywhere; the command is still `chad`
uvx chad-code prove    # offline smoke test: 4 tiny fix-it tasks, verified, timed 🗿

The first run asks, then downloads the model once (~13 GB) into the shared Hugging Face cache. While it downloads, `cd` into a project and think of a scoped first ask: *"fix the failing test in `tests/test_x.py`"* lands, *"improve my codebase"* flails.

chad targets 24 GB and nothing smaller. It runs below that and tells you it is doing so, but 13 GB of weights sit resident before a single token of context, so a 16 GB Mac gets a window too small to work in.

The PyPI package is `chad-code`. Bare `chad` is an unrelated squatted package.


Real session, unedited (the silent prefill is cut). A local model finds the cent that floor division loses, fixes it, and verifies itself, then runs your own `pytest` in your own shell. Recorded with `--yolo` so nothing pauses for a keypress; the default mode stops and asks before every edit and every comma