helis-d/waylou

Waylou is an open source AI coding assistant that runs in your terminal, forked from Google's Gemini CLI. Where the original only connects to Gemini, Waylou lets you plug in several different AI providers through one interface, including Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama for local models, and DeepSeek. You bring your own API keys for whichever providers you want to use, and you can even switch models mid session. One of its bigger features is provider orchestration, which lets you set up a team of models with different roles, such as one acting as architect, one as coder, and one as reviewer, with tasks distributed between them using strategies like picking the best model for the job, round robin, or having several models vote. It also defines something called the ACE specification, short for Agentic Coding Environment, which standardizes how an AI agent is allowed to behave at three levels: basic file and shell operations, standard features like memory and sandboxing, and enterprise features like policy enforcement and audit logging. Waylou can run interactively in your terminal or headlessly, meaning it can be scripted into CI/CD pipelines and automated workflows without a human typing into it. For finding relevant code, it uses a context engine that combines vector embeddings with AST based code analysis. For safety, it can execute commands inside a sandbox using macOS Seatbelt, Docker, or Podman. Installing it requires Node.js 20 or newer and npm 9 or newer, and you can install it globally with npm or run it directly with npx. The project describes itself as under active development, with core functionality working but the provider layer still being built out, and the maintainers say that layer is where they most want help from contributors. It is released under the Apache License 2.0.