Zot: A Lightweight Terminal Coding Agent Now Supports Claude Opus 4.8

Zot is a minimal terminal coding agent distributed as a single static Go binary — no runtime, no Docker, no plugin system with a dedicated package manager. Just the agent loop. Drop it on your $PATH and go. It now supports Claude Opus 4.8 (listed under Anthropic provider) alongside dozens of other models.

Provider Catalog

Zot ships a broad provider catalog with unified IDs across interactive /login, /model, --provider, and --list-models. Subscription-capable providers include Anthropic (Claude Pro/Max), OpenAI Codex / ChatGPT Plus/Pro, Kimi Code, and GitHub Copilot. Direct API providers include Anthropic, OpenAI (Chat Completions & Responses), DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Kimi/Moonshot, Groq, Cerebras, xAI, Together AI, Hugging Face Router, OpenRouter, Mistral, Z.AI, Xiaomi, MiniMax, Fireworks, Vercel AI Gateway, and OpenCode. Cloud/platform providers: Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI, Cloudflare Workers AI, and Cloudflare AI Gateway. Local/compatible providers: Ollama and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint via --base-url.

Four Run Modes

• Interactive — full TUI with streaming output, slash commands, queued messages, and inline side-chat.
• Print — zot -p <prompt> for one-shot assistant text to stdout. Great for shell pipelines.
• Json — zot --json <prompt> emits NDJSON events to stdout. Perfect for scripts and CI.
• RPC — zot rpc runs as a long-lived child process with NDJSON commands on stdin and events on stdout. Drop into apps written in any language.

Built-in Tools

• read — read text files, render PNG/JPG/GIF/WebP inline on modern terminals.
• write — create or overwrite files, making parent directories as needed.
• edit — one or more exact-match replacements in an existing file.
• bash — run a shell command with merged stdout/stderr and a timeout. Use /jail to confine every tool to the current directory. Bash refuses sudo, rm -rf /, and other escape patterns as a guardrail.

Extensions

Extensions can be written in any language via subprocess plus JSON-RPC protocol. They register slash commands, expose new tools, intercept tool calls for permission gates, and open interactive panels in the TUI. Install with zot ext install ./my-extension, list with zot ext list, tail logs with zot ext logs my-extension -f. Updates also fast-forward git-installed extensions.

Model Discovery

--list-models and /model show merged catalogs across all providers, including built-in entries and live IDs discovered from GET /v1/models using stored API keys (cached in $ZOT_HOME/models-cache.json for six hours). Custom models can be added via $ZOT_HOME/models.json, with user entries taking precedence.