Introducing Croo

Croo is a quick, minimal, open-source terminal coding agent with a pixel frog. Bring your own API key or a local model.

October 19, 2026 · Croo · Product · Open source · Crooli News

A tiny terminal coding agent with a frog in it.

Coding agents have become powerful, and often large: accounts to create, backends to trust, and a lot of code you will never read.

Croo takes the opposite approach. It is a quick, minimal, open-source coding agent that runs in your terminal, talks to the model you choose, and stays small enough to understand.

Fully local

Croo has no accounts, no telemetry, and no backend. Your configuration and history stay on your machine, and your requests go only to the model provider you pick.

Bring your own model

Use OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini with your own API key. Or point Croo at anything OpenAI-compatible: OpenRouter, Groq, Together, DeepSeek, Mistral, or a local model through Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, or vLLM.

Croo works with API keys and compatible endpoints. It does not use anyone's consumer-subscription logins.

You stay in control

Reading files and searching code happen freely. Anything that writes or runs does not: every file edit shows a diff, every shell command shows the exact command, and Croo waits for your answer before it continues.

File tools cannot leave the current directory, symlinks included. Add a CROO.md or AGENTS.md to a project and Croo includes it in its instructions.

Small and readable

Croo is written in TypeScript with zero runtime dependencies, using native fetch. You can read the whole thing in an afternoon, and change it if you disagree with it.

A little charm

A pixel frog lives in your terminal. It blinks, hops while tools run, and reacts when things go well or badly. If you would rather it stayed home, --no-pet sends it back to its lily pad.

Try it

Croo needs Node 20 or newer.

npm i -g croo-cli
croo --demo

The demo runs a scripted fake model through the whole interface, so you can see streaming output, tool cards, and a diff prompt without an API key.

Croo is free and MIT licensed. Read the code, report issues, or send a pull request on GitHub, or see the Croo page for the full overview.