Amber

Amber

I built Amber because I wanted a coding agent that felt like a terminal — but with a browser UI to take advantage of linking. Also Claude Code has a serious amount of bloat that I wanted to cut out.

So I reverse-engineered Claude Code and rebuilt it from scratch as a minimal local web CLI, with prompt-accurate reproduction of the workflow.

Amber takes advantage of the fact that it's in a web browser to do many things that CLIs cannot do easily, such as linking forked sessions together with hyperlinks, and linking agent sessions to the main session and vice versa.

What makes it different:

• Amber takes advantage of hyperlinks: agent sessions are session forks that are links in the browser.
• Provider-agnostic — works with both Anthropic- and OpenAI-compatible APIs.
• Only 3 runtime npm dependencies — diff, markdown-it, and smol-toml for parsing settings. No framework, no database, no bloat.
• Easily configurable sub-agents. You can even customize the model per each agent.
• Claude Code, rebuilt. Reverse-engineered from Claude Code's behavior, reproducing the prompt flow accurately while stripping it down to a lightweight tool.

Install and run

Prebuilt binary

Linux x86_64 and Apple Silicon macOS are supported.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tpolasek/amber/main/install.sh | sh
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
amber

The first run creates **~/.amber/settings.toml**. Add your provider credentials, then run **amber** again. AMBER opens its local browser interface automatically.

Run from source

Requires Node.js 18.17 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/tpolasek/amber.git
cd amber
npm install
npm run build
npm start

For development with automatic rebuilds:

npm run dev

Configure **settings.toml**

AMBER reads **~/.amber/settings.toml**. Each provider i