Meet Plank.
It's a good board.
The agent local inference deserves.
A coding agent that runs entirely on your Mac. No cloud, no API keys, no “your request has been queued.” Just you, your Metal GPU, and a suspiciously capable piece of wood.
brew install aovestdipaperino/tap/plank-agent
Seasoned lumber — the stable channel. brew upgrade keeps you steady.
Why keep it local
Your code stays in the workshop.
Works in airplane mode
The only agent that respects your window seat. Zero bars, full brain.
No secrets leave the Mac
Your API keys, your NDAs, your embarrassing variable names — all stay home.
$0.00 per token
The bill for local inference is a slightly warmer laptop. That's the whole invoice.
No round trips
Runs DeepSeek V4 Flash right there on Metal, or Gemma 4 in 5 GB on a laptop. The latency is you thinking.
What's in the box
Batteries, tools, and one plank.
Lives in your terminal
A cozy Ratatui TUI with streaming output, thinking, diffs, and a status bar that occasionally roasts you.
A full tool belt
Read, edit, glob, bash (sync & background jobs), web fetch — the boring superpowers that actually ship code.
Speaks MCP
Plug in your own MCP servers via a tidy .mcp.json. Plank makes friends easily.
Remembers things
Persistent sessions with a real KV-cache, so it only re-reads the new stuff. Elephants, meet lumber.
Looks at your screenshots
Paste a picture and ask what broke. A vision encoder ships beside the model and runs on the same Metal device, so the pixels never leave the Mac.
Taps you on the shoulder
Native macOS notifications when a turn finishes or it needs you. No hooks, no fuss.
Written in Rust
Fast, fearless, and it compiles clean under -D warnings. The plank has standards.
Since you were last here
The plank has been busy.
A few of the newest arrivals. Turns that used to wander now finish, what you type mid-turn stays where you can see it, and a question you disagree with is no longer a forced choice.
Minutes, not hours
A repetition guard stops a turn the moment its reasoning starts looping, and low-effort thinking is the default. Measured on one real request: from two hours with nothing to show, to a tested change in 16 minutes.
Type while it works
A prompt you write mid-turn waits in a region pinned under the status bar, in view until the turn takes it. It survives a resize — and a turn that errors out hands it back to you instead of dropping it.
“Chat about this”
When the model asks you a multiple-choice question, one row is always yours: none of these, talk to me first. It stops and waits instead of picking for you.
Real screenshots, no mockups
Yes, it actually does this.
Read the manual
The whole thing, explained.
Thirteen chapters, from brew install to branching a session mid-turn. Written for people using plank, not building it.
- 1InstallationHomebrew, channels, building from source, getting the model
- 2Getting startedyour first session, the three front ends, one-shot mode
- 3The interfacethe TUI tour, keybindings,
@completion,!commands, images - 4Slash commandsthe complete command reference
- 5Toolswhat the model can do, the sandbox, plan mode, questions, task lists
- 6Sessionssaving, resuming, checkpoints, branching, export
- 7Contextthe context window, compaction,
AGENTS.md, memory - 8Configuration
settings.json, command-line flags, precedence - 9Extending plankskills, templates, subagents, hooks, MCP servers
- 10Remote and hosted engines
serve,--remote, shared engines, providers - 11The arcadethe games that run over a live turn
- 12Advanced workflowsbranching, delegation, long sessions, repeatability
- 13Troubleshootingwhen something goes wrong
Read the book
How the plank got built.
Writing an Agent Harness in Rust is the story of plank told from the workbench: why a local model makes the cache your problem, how the loop guards learned to catch a model going in circles, where memory can live without breaking the prompt. You build your own small harness along the way, one subsystem per chapter, with a test for every claim.
Fourteen chapters and six appendices, DRM-free EPUB and PDF. It is a living edition: revised as plank's answers change, and every update is included.
A day in the life
You talk. Plank works.
you ▸ add a dark mode toggle and don't break anything 🪵 reading src/theme.rs … editing 3 files … running tests … ✓ 47 passing, 0 failed 🔔 turn complete you ▸ ship it plank ▸ that's a you decision, friend. i'm a board.