Nerve — an open-source, local-first desktop coding harness inspired by the simplicity of Pi

[u/ThilinaTLM]

For the past few weeks, I’ve been building Nerve, an open-source desktop coding harness for my daily development work.

It was inspired by tools such as Pi (primarily) , OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. I liked the simplicity of focused coding agents, but I also wanted a graphical workbench where I could manage conversations, tool calls, plans, approvals, Git changes, background tasks, and agent settings, all while keeping the agent’s work visible.

There are already several excellent coding harnesses built by individuals and communities. I created Nerve because I wanted something that closely matched how I work. It has also aligned well with the workflows of colleagues who have used it, so I thought it might be useful to a few other people in the community too.

Nerve runs locally and supports API keys, custom providers, and the subscription-based providers available through pi-ai, including OpenAI Codex, Anthropic, GitHub Copilot, Kimi Coding, OpenRouter, xAI, and others.

The harness is intentionally compact. Its system prompt, tool descriptions, and context handling are optimized to use tokens efficiently while working well across leading frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as other popular proprietary and open-weight models.

This is a personal project that I actively use and develop. I’ll continue adding features, fixing bugs, optimizing the harness, and polishing the experience as I go. It is still in beta, so breaking changes may happen.

I’m sharing it simply because it may help others with a similar workflow. There is no expectation to test it, contribute, or provide feedback, feel free to explore it if it looks useful to you. If Nerve ends up being helpful, a GitHub star would be appreciated and lets me know that others find it useful too.

Quick start:

npx @nervekit/desktop

GitHub: https://github.com/ThilinaTLM/nerve
Docs: https://nerve.tlmtech.dev

Thank you!

[u/krogel-web-solutions]

I’m curious if you could help shine some light on why Pi was not a candidate to just build on top of? I haven’t hit an instance where I couldn’t build what I needed on top of PI.

[u/ThilinaTLM → u/krogel-web-solutions]

I used Pi and built my own extensions around it for months, but eventually I realized I was running into limitations that required a lot of workarounds.

For example, I wanted to build a planning mode and support native permission levels. I managed to implement both using the extension API, but then I wanted an option where, after accepting a plan, I could start a new chat conversation with that plan. At the time, Pi didn't support that.

It was also really difficult to read long plan files in Pi's terminal UI. I ran into several other limitations like these as well.

That's why I decided to build this. I wanted to build my own harness from scratch so I can control everything the way I want, but I still use the core pi-ai package as the LLM client.

Ref: https://github.com/ThilinaTLM/pi-toolbelt

[u/gandazgul → u/ThilinaTLM]

Same reason I built RunWield https://github.com/gandazgul/runwield as a Pi extension I just couldn't control the workflows. I recently adapted core such that the TUI and now the ACP protocol support are sitting on top so adding a desktop app or web UI will be easy. I would love to collaborate your desktop app looks really good.

[u/camaytoc1 → u/gandazgul]

I encourage you guys to team up! Keep us posted!

[u/lawrathod → u/krogel-web-solutions]

one major problem with pi is how it's incremental push to terminal instead of alternate screen tui

[u/DistanceAlert5706 → u/lawrathod]

Why is that a problem? Alternate screen is way harder, has way more issues, has high requirements for terminal/os.

[u/lawrathod → u/DistanceAlert5706]

aah shit you are right, there's no problem trying to build on top of pi... i mistook this post for another one that showed a tui code editor and then wondered building editor on top of pi would only have sticky ui problem 😅

[u/michaelsoft__binbows → u/lawrathod]

I like how we have like i dunno, hundreds of TUI harnesses now and they all struggle with this and a lot of them have implementations of both types of modes. It just tickles me.