# little-coder

> A harness optimized to smaller LLMs

## Facts
- **Category:** [Coding Agents](https://agentsearchengine.app/category/coding-agents)
- **Type:** Agent
- **Pricing:** Open source
- **GitHub stars:** 2,230
- **Language:** TypeScript
- **License:** Apache-2.0
- **Last repo activity:** 3 days ago (Jul 31, 2026)
- **Official site:** https://itayinbarr.github.io/little-coder/
- **Source code:** https://github.com/itayinbarr/little-coder
- **Listing on Agent Search Engine:** https://agentsearchengine.app/agents/little-coder
- **Data verified:** July 2026

## About little-coder
The research story behind all this — why scaffold–model fit matters, how a 9.7 B Qwen beat frontier entries on Aider Polyglot, and what the load-bearing mechanisms actually do — is written up on Substack: *Honey, I Shrunk the Coding Agent*. Start there if you want the "why"; stay here for the "how". pi is the minimal substrate — agent loop, multi-provider API, TUI, session tree, compaction, extension model. Four built-in tools (read / write / edit / bash) and a ~1000-token system prompt. little-coder is pi + 20 extensions + 30 skill markdown files + a Python benchmark harness. It doesn't fork pi or shadow its CLI — pi is a plain dependency in package.json, and everything little-coder-specific lives under .pi/extensions/, skills/, and benchmarks/. The launcher runs pi with --no-extensions and wires in exactly the bundled set, so you add your own extension by dropping a directory into .pi/extensions/ (or passing little-coder -e /path/to/ext/index.ts at launch) and remove one of…

_From the project's README._

## Install

```
npm install -g little-coder
```

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