Refact.ai

You will like the modes, Explore before Plan before Agent, which stops edits before reading has happened, and you will like that the IDE plugin is thin because the work happens in a local process you can watch. On a real repository that shows: the agent reads before it writes, and the plugin does not fall over when the project is large. You will not like how few people run the current build, so the bug you hit is yours to report and yours to wait on.

Pick it if you enjoy that quiet and want everything local. Pick Cline for the same freedom with a crowd.

The risk is maintenance. The original repository, smallcloudai/refact, is archived; the active code is a fork under an individual's GitHub account, JegernOUTT/refact, and the install script pulls from that account's raw URL. One person's account is the supply chain, and when that person stops, the project stops at the last commit.

Pin a commit and mirror the install script before you depend on it. What it does right: the task planner runs each agent in its own git worktree, so parallel agents cannot collide on a file, which is more isolation than most single-agent tools bother with.

The architecture is deliberate. 1. A single binary runs a supervisor and one warm worker per opened project, handling chat, tools and indexing, so the editor plugin is a client rather than a host. 2. Context comes from tree, regex, AST and semantic search backed by a local vector index, a retrieval design rather than a read-everything design. 3. Edits go through apply_patch and textdoc tools, so an edit is a patch the worker applies, not a rewrite the model emits.

No benchmark is published and no verification loop beyond the shell is described. The observation: the design outlived the company that wrote it.

Small Magellanic Cloud AI shipped this from April 2023, a full tool wave. The tell is the retirement of Refact Cloud, the Pro subscription and managed inference, announced April 30, 2026: the revenue line was switched off and the code left running, which is what a company does when the revenue was never enough to argue about. The successor repository shows 65 stars, so the community that would carry it is a room, not a crowd.

No acquirer buys a shut cloud; the pivot already happened, from company to hobby. Position: zero as a vendor, nonzero as a codebase.

The demo is a terminal UI with a browser dashboard served from the laptop. Procurement has no counterparty: no seat, no contract, no SSO, no SCIM, no retention policy and no support line. Sixty engineers each run the full stack locally, which is sixty configurations, sixty indexes of our source on sixty disks, and nothing central to audit.

A headless path exists for CI, unowned by anyone we could call. Onboarding is a wiki page and an installer from a personal account. Cost is tokens only, the one line that reads well. Not yet.

This is the kind of thing I run. BSD-3-Clause, zero cloud, provider definitions and privacy rules in ~/.config/refact/, per-project state in .refact/, and backends that include Ollama, LM Studio and vLLM for my own hardware alongside Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter and, oddly, GitHub Copilot. MCP servers are documented in the wiki and live in the same config tree.

Forkability is the whole story: the license permits it and the source builds from a script. If the maintainer vanishes, I have the code and the build. Enough.