rho

A coding agent you pair with.

Reads your code, runs your tests, and works the problem with you — on your machine, with your approval at every step.

Install

Get rho and the rho-egui desktop UI running on your machine.

What you need

  • A Rust toolchain — edition 2024, so a current stable.
  • PowerShell 7+ (pwsh) — rho runs shell commands through it. This is deliberate: the model generates PowerShell, not bash, so what you see is what runs.
  • A model — either a local server (LM Studio, Ollama) or an API key for a hosted provider. You choose; rho has no opinion.

Get rho

git clone https://github.com/crustyrustacean/rho-coding-agent
cd rho-coding-agent
cargo build --release --package rho

Put the binary somewhere on your PATH. target/release/rho.exe is where it lands on Windows.

Get the UI

rho-egui is the official desktop UI — a native app that spawns rho in the background and renders the agent as a chat.

git clone https://github.com/crustyrustacean/rho-egui && cd rho-egui
cargo run

It looks for rho on your PATH. If you'd rather point it at a specific build, set RHO_PATH:

RHO_PATH=/path/to/rho cargo run

Point it at a model

Local model — start LM Studio or Ollama on localhost:1234, then:

rho --model <model-id>

Hosted provider — put your key in an environment variable and add a provider to .rho/config.toml. Keys are never stored in config:

[agent]
model = "gpt-4o"
token_budget = 131072

[[providers]]
preset = "openai"
api_key_env = "OPENAI_API_KEY"

export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..."
rho --accept-external-provider

That flag skips the one-time consent prompt telling you your code is about to leave your machine. You should read it the first time.

If something goes wrong

rho keeps two records worth knowing about. Session data — the full entry history for every project — lives under ~/.rho/sessions, filed by project. And logs/ inside the project holds the runtime logs for the work you did there. When something misbehaves, the session file tells you what the agent saw; the log tells you what the agent did.

The documentation covers providers, tools, and configuration in full.