Skip to main content

Overview

Elph is a local AI coding agent harness. It runs as an interactive TUI (elph), as a headless prompt (elph run), and as an ACP server for editors (elph acp --stdio).

The core harness follows Pi: a small session loop, tools, providers, and a terminal UI you can extend. Elph keeps that model and adds a local project store, floppy memory, worktrees, MCP, WASM extensions, Plan vs Build, and Claude/Codex import.

You bring the model. Sessions and memory stay on disk in the project .elph/ store. There is no required cloud agent backend.

Elph is pre-alpha. Breaking changes and bugs are expected. Check GitHub Releases before you upgrade.

Surfaces

Command Role
elph Interactive TUI — transcript, slash palette, mouse support
elph run "…" Headless prompt for scripts and CI
elph acp --stdio Agent Client Protocol v1 (add --experimental for v2)

What stays local

  • Config: ~/.config/elph/ (ELPH_HOME)
  • Data: ~/.local/share/elph/ (ELPH_DATA_DIR)
  • Project: <cwd>/.elph/ — memory (store.db). .elph/extensions/ and .elph/plans/ are created only when you install a project extension or save a plan. Global AGENTS.md is optional and is not written on first run.

Start here