chad: a coding agent for your macbook pro

Claude can do anything, for anyone, anywhere. chad does one thing. 🗿

Coding under supervision.

chad is a coding agent that runs entirely on an Apple Silicon Mac via MLX. One 27B model and no API key. (Not affiliated with Anthropic.)

uvx chad-code          # runs anywhere; the command is still chad
uvx chad-code prove    # offline smoke test: 4 tiny fix-it tasks, verified, timed 🗿

The first run asks, then downloads the model once (~14 GB). The PyPI package is chad-code.

!chad fixing a failing test end to end: reason, read, edit, run pytest, confirm green, all on a local model

Real session, unedited.

Why chad

Plenty of harnesses run local models now, and pi is a fantastic default for the same reason llama.cpp is: it works with everything. chad is moving the opposite direction.

1 set of silicon. This project is focused on making the macbook pro you already have usable. Not a $10K GPU.

1 capable model. Qwen 3.8 27B. This isn't the frontier, but you probably aren't solving frontier problems. Focus on 1 model buys _speed_. You'll experience ~ 50 tokens/second generation in a real session instead of ~ 10 tokens/second for stock llama.cpp implementations. This speed comes from MLX, a couple of targeted custom kernels for this model, and a bundled dflash2 drafter. The weights are Unsloth's UD-Q3_K_XL GGUF and are read natively into MLX.

1 tightly-coupled agent loop. Instead of a standard /completions endpoint, the agent loop in chad owns the backend process. This comes with nice advantages that make the KV cache more stable and the coding experience measurably better (no long prefills!).

Why not

You do not have an Apple Silicon with 24 GB RAM. You want to pick your local model. You need a frontier model in a data center. The list goes on.

Documentation

• Installing & using chad covers install, extras and upgrades, the

• Throughput & performance has every number above, the stock-engine

• Design is the argument: why the agent owns the engine, why there are

• Architecture is the module map, the session file format and the

• Configuration reference documents project instructions, Agent

• Troubleshooting maps symptoms to knobs for when a session

• Contributing says what lands easily and what needs a conversation