click: /neko tortie|dilute · shift-click: /neko mini|large — keep clicking at your own risk

There are many agent harnesses but this one

Neko is a minimal agent harness. It will adapt to your workflows when it is good and ready.

curl -fsSL https://get-neko.mcqueen.horse/install.sh | bash

macOS, Linux, Windows — six builds. The cat runs on Windows against its will.

neko — knead it yours

and it can chase the laser pointer

Why Neko?

Neko is a fork of Pi that keeps full compatibility with the Pi extension API — extensions written against @earendil-works/pi-* load unmodified, and are then slept on.

Pi's tagline says the harness is yours. Ours is honest: nothing here is yours. The keyboard is the cat's. The chair is the cat's. The context window is the cat's, which is why it keeps getting compacted into a smaller box.

Two entry points: neko for professionals, catgirl for the honest.

Read the upstream docs

Change the harness, not your workflow

Ask Neko to modify itself, hit /reload, and keep going. It will customize itself on the fly, then sit precisely on the part of the TUI you were trying to read.

The fork ships a real Pi-compatible extension that renders this exact pixel cat above the chat editor with truecolor half-blocks: it sits and blinks while idle, paces while thinking, paces briskly while writing. Configure at runtime: /neko mini|large, /neko tortie|dilute, /neko headlow|headup, and /neko off for people who are wrong.

15+ food bowls, hundreds of flavors

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and a dozen more. Neko sniffs each bowl, walks away, and eats from the one you least expected. Switch mid-session with /model — the cat does not care which model it ignores.

Tree-structured history. Cats climb trees.

Sessions are stored as trees, the most cat-compatible data structure in computer science. Use /tree to climb to any previous point. Getting the session back down may require the fire department.

All branches live in a single file, because if it fits, it ships.

Context engineering

AGENTS.md: project instructions loaded at startup from ~/.neko/agent/. Read carefully, then disregarded, then followed perfectly the moment you stop watching.

Compaction: auto-summarizes older messages near the context limit, the way a cat compacts itself into a box two sizes too small. Lossy, but extremely comfortable.

Skills: capability packages loaded on demand. Progressive disclosure, like a cat revealing it always knew how to open the door.

Steer or follow up

Enter steers the current run immediately. Alt+Enter queues a follow-up for when the agent finishes. Both are received the way a cat receives its name: acknowledged, timestamped, acted upon at a time of the cat's choosing.

Zoomies and rainbows

/fast: faster inference at higher cost. The cat gets the zoomies. Persists across sessions, because zoomies are a lifestyle.

/ultra: maximum reasoning on models that support it. The cat streams a rainbow contrail while it works. This is not a metaphor. It is compiled binary behavior.

What we didn't build

Neko is aggressively extensible so it doesn't have to dictate your workflow. It dictates your workflow anyway, but through sheer personality.

  • No MCP

    The cat brought you a CLI tool with a README instead. It is on your pillow. It is a gift.

  • Sub-agents (fine, we built those)

    It turns out you can herd cats if each one gets its own context window. Three tiers: heavy, medium, light — a cat, a kitten, and a kitten's understudy.

  • No permission popups

    A cat has never once asked permission. Run in a container; the cat already lives in a box.

  • No plan mode

    Cats do not plan. Cats stare at a fixed point on the wall for forty minutes and then execute flawlessly.

  • No built-in to-dos

    Use a TODO.md file. The cat will sit on it. It is warm.

  • No background bash

    Use tmux. Full observability — the cat insists on watching everything you do, especially at 4am.

also, it can knock the site off the table

Get involved with Neko

  • Issues

    Filed on GitHub, or scratched directly into the couch.

  • Reviews

    All pull requests are reviewed by walking across the keyboard. gjkl;fdsa means approved.

  • Docs

    Ask the agent to explain itself. It will explain a different, more interesting topic.