GitHub - dirac-run/dirac: Coding Agent singularly focused efficiency and context curation. Reduces API costs by 50-80% vs other agent AND improves the code quality at the same time. Uses Hash Anchored edits, massively parallel operations, AST manipulation and many many other optimizations. https://dirac.run/

6 min read Original article ↗

Dirac - Accurate & Highly Token Efficient Open Source AI Agent

Dirac topped the Terminal-Bench-2 leaderboard for gemini-3-flash-preview with a 65.2% score!

It is a well studied phenomenon that any given model's reasoning ability degrades with the context length. If we can keep context tightly curated, we improve both accuracy and cost while making larger changes tractable in a single task.

Dirac is an open-source coding agent built with this in mind. It reduces API costs by 64.8% on average while producing better and faster work. Using hash-anchored parallel edits, AST manipulation, and a suite of advanced optimizations. Oh, and no MCP.

Our goal: Optimize for bang-for-the-buck on tooling with bare minimum prompting instead of going blindly minimalistic.

📊 Evals

Dirac is benchmarked against other leading open-source agents on complex, real-world refactoring tasks. Dirac consistently achieves 100% accuracy at a fraction of the cost. These evals are run on public github repos and should be reproducible by anyone.

🏆 TerminalBench 2.0 Leaderboard: Dirac recently topped the Terminal-Bench-2 leaderboard with a 65.2% score using gemini-3-flash-preview. This outperforms both Google's official baseline (47.6%) and the top closed-source agent Junie CLI (64.3%). This was achieved without any benchmark-specific info or any AGENTS.md files being inserted.

Note on the cost table below: A bug was discovered in Cline, the parent repo, after running these evals (issue #10314). We have submitted a PR #10315 to fix this. This bug caused the evals for Dirac and Cline to slightly underreport the numbers ($0.03 vs $0.05 per million token cache read). Although there won't be a large difference, we will update the evals soon.

All tasks for all models used gemini-3-flash-preview with thinking set to high

Task (Repo) Files* Cline Kilo Ohmypi Opencode Pimono Roo Dirac
Task1 (transformers) 8 🟢 (diff) [$0.37] 🔴 (diff) [N/A] 🟡 (diff) [$0.24] 🟢 (diff) [$0.20] 🟢 (diff) [$0.34] 🟢 (diff) [$0.49] 🟢 (diff) [$0.13]
Task2 (vscode) 21 🟢 (diff) [$0.67] 🟡 (diff) [$0.78] 🟢 (diff) [$0.63] 🟢 (diff) [$0.40] 🟢 (diff) [$0.48] 🟡 (diff) [$0.58] 🟢 (diff) [$0.23]
Task3 (vscode) 12 🟡 (diff) [$0.42] 🟢 (diff) [$0.70] 🟢 (diff) [$0.64] 🟢 (diff) [$0.32] 🟢 (diff) [$0.25] 🟡 (diff) [$0.45] 🟢 (diff) [$0.16]
Task4 (django) 14 🟢 (diff) [$0.36] 🟢 (diff) [$0.42] 🟡 (diff) [$0.32] 🟢 (diff) [$0.24] 🟡 (diff) [$0.24] 🟢 (diff) [$0.17] 🟢 (diff) [$0.08]
Task5 (vscode) 3 🔴 (diff) [N/A] 🟢 (diff) [$0.71] 🟢 (diff) [$0.43] 🟢 (diff) [$0.53] 🟢 (diff) [$0.50] 🟢 (diff) [$0.36] 🟢 (diff) [$0.17]
Task6 (transformers) 25 🟢 (diff) [$0.87] 🟡 (diff) [$1.51] 🟢 (diff) [$0.94] 🟢 (diff) [$0.90] 🟢 (diff) [$0.52] 🟢 (diff) [$1.44] 🟢 (diff) [$0.34]
Task7 (vscode) 13 🟡 (diff) [$0.51] 🟢 (diff) [$0.77] 🟢 (diff) [$0.74] 🟢 (diff) [$0.67] 🟡 (diff) [$0.45] 🟢 (diff) [$1.05] 🟢 (diff) [$0.25]
Task8 (transformers) 3 🟢 (diff) [$0.25] 🟢 (diff) [$0.19] 🟢 (diff) [$0.17] 🟢 (diff) [$0.26] 🟢 (diff) [$0.23] 🟢 (diff) [$0.29] 🟢 (diff) [$0.12]
Total Correct 5/8 5/8 6/8 8/8 6/8 6/8 8/8
Avg Cost $0.49 $0.73 $0.51 $0.44 $0.38 $0.60 $0.18

🟢 Success | 🟡 Incomplete | 🔴 Failure

Cost Comparison: Dirac is 64.8% cheaper than the competition (a 2.8x cost reduction).

* Expected number of files to be modified/created to complete the task.

See evals/README.md for detailed task descriptions and methodology.

🚀 Key Features

  • Hash-Anchored Edits: Dirac uses stable line hashes to target edits with extreme precision, avoiding the "lost in translation" issues of traditional line-number based editing. Hash-Anchored Edits
  • AST-Native Precision: Built-in understanding of language syntax (TypeScript, Python, C++, etc.) allows Dirac to perform structural manipulations like function extraction or class refactoring with 100% accuracy. AST-Native Precision
  • Multi-File Batching: Dirac can process and edit multiple files in a single LLM roundtrip, significantly reducing latency and API costs. Multi-File Batching
  • High-Bandwidth Context: Optimized context curation keeps the agent lean and fast, ensuring the LLM always has the most relevant information without wasting tokens.
  • Autonomous Tool Use: Dirac can read/write files, execute terminal commands, use a headless browser, and more - all while keeping you in control with an approval-based workflow.
  • Skills & AGENTS.md: Customize Dirac's behavior with project-specific instructions using AGENTS.md files. It also seamlessly picks up Claude's skills by automatically reading from .ai, .claude, and .agents directories.
  • Native Tool Calling Only: To ensure maximum reliability and performance, Dirac exclusively supports models with native tool calling enabled. (Note: MCP is not supported).

📦 Installation

VS Code Extension

Install Dirac from the VS Code Marketplace.

CLI (Terminal)

Install the Dirac CLI globally using npm:

Note: Node.js v25 is currently not supported due to an upstream V8 Turboshaft compiler bug that causes out-of-memory crashes during WASM initialization. Please use Node.js v20, v22, or v24 (LTS versions).

🚀 CLI Quick Start

  1. Authenticate:
  2. Run your first task:
    dirac "Analyze the architecture of this project"

Configuration (Environment Variables)

You can provide API keys via environment variables to skip the dirac auth step. This is ideal for CI/CD or non-persistent environments.

For provider-specific setup (e.g. AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI), see the Provider Settings guide.

Common API Keys:

  • ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
  • OPENAI_API_KEY
  • OPENROUTER_API_KEY
  • GEMINI_API_KEY
  • GROQ_API_KEY
  • MISTRAL_API_KEY
  • XAI_API_KEY (x.ai)
  • HF_TOKEN (HuggingFace)
  • ... and others (see src/shared/storage/env-config.ts for the full list).

Using Any OpenAI compatible endpoint

You can use OPENAI_COMPATIBLE_CUSTOM_KEY (or its alias OPENAI_API_BASE) for any provider and model as long as it exposes an OpenAI compatible endpoint. Using these variables requires providing both the model and the provider in the cli

$ OPENAI_API_BASE="xxx" dirac -y --provider "https://api.deepseek.com/v1" --model deepseek-v4-flash "explain Dirac Delta function"

Common Commands

  • dirac "prompt": Start an interactive task.
  • dirac -p "prompt": Run in Plan Mode to see the strategy before executing.
  • dirac -y "prompt": Yolo Mode (auto-approve all actions, great for simple fixes).
  • git diff | dirac "Review these changes": Pipe context directly into Dirac.
  • dirac history: View and resume previous tasks.

🛠️ Getting Started

  1. Open the Dirac sidebar in VS Code.
  2. Configure your preferred AI provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, etc.).
  3. Start a new task by describing what you want to build or fix.
  4. Watch Dirac go!

📈 Star History

Star History Chart

📄 License

Dirac is open source and licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

🤝 Acknowledgments

Dirac is a fork of the excellent Cline project. We are grateful to the Cline team and contributors for their foundational work.


Built with ❤️ by Max Trivedi at Dirac Delta Labs