Nanocoder
A local-first, community-built coding agent for your terminal — bring your own model, keep your code.
About
Nanocoder is an open coding agent for the terminal built by the Nano Collective — a community collective, not a company. The pitch is privacy and control: bring your own model (local via Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible API like OpenRouter, Anthropic, or Google), keep your code on your machine, and owe nothing to anyone. No closed-source features, no paid tiers gating the useful parts.
It is a real agentic coder, not a chat wrapper: non-interactive run mode with --provider/--model flags for scripting, interactive mode, and provider-per-invocation switching. Installation is via npm, Homebrew, or Nix flakes.
The honest caveat: community-built means community-paced — ~2,500 stars and a small maintainer base versus the venture-backed CLI agents. The license field on GitHub is undeclared, which sits oddly next to the "open for all" messaging; check the repo for the actual terms before depending on it. But if local-first AI coding matters to you, this is one of the few agents designed around it from the start rather than as a deployment option.
What it can do
- Local-first agentic coding: Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible provider
- Per-invocation provider/model switching via CLI flags
- Non-interactive run mode for scripting and CI
- Interactive terminal mode
- No paid tiers; community-built and community-governed
- Privacy-respecting: your code stays on your machine
Setup
- Install:
npm install -g @nanocollective/nanocoder(or Homebrew / Nix flakes). - Choose a provider: local via Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible API (OpenRouter, Anthropic, Google, Requesty, ...).
- Interactive:
nanocoder(optionally--provider ollama --model llama3.1). - Scripted:
nanocoder --provider openrouter --model google/gemini-3.1-flash run "analyze src/app.ts".
Prerequisites
Node.js (npm path) or Homebrew/Nix; a local model via Ollama or an API key for an OpenAI-compatible provider.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Adoption 7: starScore from 2,518 stars on Nano-Collective/nanocoder (log scale vs 298k peer max); Maintenance 9: pushed 2026-10-15 (recency 10); active community development; Openness 7: license undeclared on GitHub (0.7*5) + official docs verified (0.3*10); Manual 7: local-first positioning corroborated by README and nanocollective.org; docked for small maintainer base and license ambiguity. License: Undeclared.
★ 2,518 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 7.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · Adoption 7: starScore from 2,518 stars on Nano-Collective/nanocoder (log scale vs 298k peer max)
- · Maintenance 9: pushed 2026-10-15 (recency 10); active community development
- · Openness 7: license undeclared on GitHub (0.7*5) + official docs verified (0.3*10)
- · Manual 7: local-first positioning corroborated by README and nanocollective.org; docked for small maintainer base and license ambiguity
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.