Dao Code

Dao Code 道

**English** · [中文](./README.zh-CN.md)

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**A terminal coding agent built around cost, experience, and availability** — squeezing the most capability and the lowest cost out of the high-value DeepSeek V4.


Dao Code (command `dao`) is a terminal-native AI coding assistant: it reads code, writes code, runs commands, and fixes bugs right in your terminal — streaming its reasoning and tool calls while executing safely behind an approval gate, until the task is done. It targets **DeepSeek V4** (1M context), is Chinese-first, and is inspired by Claude Code — but takes a different road: **rather than buying experience with an expensive model, it builds on DeepSeek's strong price-performance and ultra-cheap cache pricing, engineering byte-stable prefixes and cache-reusing forks so cross-session memory and a continuous self-correction layer add almost no token cost.**

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Why Dao Code?

🌐 Availability

A coding agent is only useful if you can actually run it.

• Claude Code needs an Anthropic account and network access — a high bar to use out of the box in mainland China;
• GLM's Coding Plan has scarce quota that's often hard to grab;
• Dao Code is fully open source (MIT), and its base DeepSeek is register-and-go, pay-as-you-go, directly reachable in mainland China — no network gymnastics, no quota grabbing, no waitlist.

💰 Cost

• Low unit price — DeepSeek sits at the lowest price tier among mainstream capable models; both input and output prices are far below the top-tier closed models.