Claude code ate his ram, so he wrote his own agent in rust. zerostack, 8.9 megabytes and about…
claude code ate his ram, so he wrote his own agent in rust. zerostack, 8.9 megabytes and about 7,000 lines, hit 540 hacker news points after its creator watched claude code chew through gigabytes.
the counter to bloat is a unix tool.
Context
The zerostack README, as fetched 4 October 2026, describes a minimal coding agent written in Rust, inspired by pi and opencode, with about 30k lines of core code excluding tests, a 26MB binary and RAM of about 16MB on average with peaks near 24MB, against about 300MB with peaks near 700MB for opencode or other JS-based agents. The Hacker News thread (item 48164287), shown as about four months old, had 575 points and 308 comments at fetch, and a commenter gives RAM of about 8MB empty and 12MB working.
The note's 8.9 megabytes and about 7,000 lines do not match the current README (26MB, about 30k lines), and may refer to an earlier version, which was not located. The thread's 575 points is a later window than 540, and the thread is about four months old, so the HN event came months before the note. The creator watching Claude Code use gigabytes is not in any creator statement read: the thread has commenters reporting Claude Code memory use, which are anecdotes. The README's RAM comparison is the author's own, and no matched test against Claude Code was read.
Watch next
- The original Show HN text and a controlled memory measurement across agents.
Sources
- gi-dellav/zerostack README (GitHub)github.com
- Zerostack, a Unix-inspired coding agent in Rust (Hacker News)news.ycombinator.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 21 September 2026 at 18:16 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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