Serf: Non-Interactive Coding Agent

2026-05-14 · source · source ↗ · raw capture · wiki page

From Prime Radiant (Jesse's company). Give it a task, it does the work. Supports OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models. Go-based.

Core Architecture

Structured loop: reads files, modifies code, runs commands, searches repositories -- all while maintaining conversation state. Sessions persist to .serf/sessions/ for resumption.

Key Components

File reading and writing
Command execution
Code search functionality
Structured output schema support

Execution Modes

Single-shot LLM calls via llmcall (no looping, no tool usage)
Full agent loop with serf (iterative task completion)
Web orchestration via serf-hub for concurrent sessions
Terminal UI dashboard via serf-tui

Session Management

Auto-saves state. Resume interrupted work with --resume-last. Carry forward context with --resume-with. Override model choices during resumption.

Technical Stack

Go (70%), Python (16.6%), JavaScript (8.8%). Multi-provider support: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Minimax, OpenRouter, Kimi, GLM, Ollama.

Notable Features

Hub architecture with loopback-only daemons and rendezvous files at ~/.serf/run/. Web interface supports edit-to-fork workflows, transparent session resumption, Cmd-K cross-session search.

Lineage

Descends from Kilroy by Dan Shapiro, originally developed for the StrongDM Attractor project.