A terminal-based coding agent for Anthropic-protocol LLM APIs — built for third-party and self-hosted providers.

Zero is a command-line coding assistant that speaks the Anthropic Messages API, but is designed from the ground up for the ecosystem of non-Anthropic providers that implement the same protocol: Zhipu GLM (z.ai), Alibaba Qwen, DeepSeek, Volcengine Doubao, Paean, and any self-hosted model you expose through an Anthropic-protocol-compatible gateway (Ollama with a proxy, vLLM, TabbyAPI, LiteLLM, etc.).

The harness — context windows, token budgets, prompt caching, permission prompts, MCP servers, skills, slash commands, agent runtime — is tuned for the realities of these providers rather than the defaults of Anthropic's first-party endpoint. Bring your own key, pick a model, start coding.

This repository contains public-facing documentation only. The Zero CLI source lives in a separate repository and is distributed as a prebuilt binary via npm. The CHANGELOG.md here is the source of truth that the CLI fetches at runtime to render release notes.

• Works with any Anthropic-protocol-compatible endpoint. Point Zero at z.ai, Volcengine, DeepSeek, your self-hosted gateway, or Anthropic itself — same CLI, same workflow.
• BYOK-first. No account required. No subscription paywalls. You hold the key; Zero just drives the API.
• Provider-aware defaults. Context windows, cache TTLs, token accounting, and welcome-banner metadata adapt per provider instead of assuming Anthropic's defaults.
• No telemetry. No analytics. No remote feature flags. Every observability / experimentation code path is a stub that silently no-ops — see Privacy for specifics.
• Model tier aliases. Use pro / flash / lite (provider-agnostic) or the original opus / sonnet / haiku names — whichever is more natural for your provider.
• Full MCP + skills + slash-command surface. The plugin ecosystem your agent already expects, minus the vendor lock-in.

Zero ships as a single prebuilt bundle on npm.

# Recommended — install globally with bun
bun add -g @paean-ai/zero-cli
# Or with npm
npm install -g @paean-ai/zero-cli
# Or run without installing
npx @paean-ai/zero-cli

The binary is named zero:

zero --version
zero --help

Requirements: Node.js 18 or newer. macOS, Linux, and Windows (WSL strongly recommended on Windows) are supported.

• Windows install + DeepSeek official API (English, npm-only, non-developer friendly): docs/windows-install-zero-cli-deepseek.md — Node.js LTS, opening a terminal, global install, and zero provider set deepseek.
• Same guide in Chinese (简体中文): docs/windows-install-zero-cli-deepseek.zh.md

The same binary is published as deeptide under the DeepTide brand — our macOS-native AI coding app from the same team. npm install -g deeptide (or bun add -g deeptide) installs the same engine and exposes a tide command:

tide --version # → 0.x.y (DeepTide CLI)

Same engine, different brand surface. The two products evolve independently; the shared interface (tool names, slash commands, hook env vars, model aliases) is documented in the tide-spec.

# 1. Launch the interactive setup
zero
# 2. Pick a provider on first run, or configure one explicitly:
zero /provider
# 3. Start a session in any project directory
cd ~/code/my-project
zero

Zero stores its configuration under ~/.zero/ and honors environment variables with the precedence:

ZERO_CLI_* > ZERO_* > ANTHROPIC_*

So ZERO_CLI_API_KEY, ZERO_API_KEY, and ANTHROPIC_API_KEY all work — the more specific one wins. Legacy ANTHROPIC_* variables are honored for drop-in compatibility with existing scripts and CI.

# z.ai / Zhipu GLM
export ZERO_API_KEY=<your-zai-key>
export ZERO_BASE_URL=https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic
zero
# DeepSeek (Anthropic-protocol endpoint)
export ZERO_API_KEY=<your-deepseek-key>
export ZERO_BASE_URL=https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic
zero
# Self-hosted / local gateway (Ollama + proxy, vLLM, LiteLLM, etc.)
export ZERO_API_KEY=<any-token-your-gateway-accepts>
export ZERO_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/anthropic
zero

Or use the interactive /provider command inside the CLI — Zero ships with presets for the most common third-party providers, so you can skip the environment-variable dance.

Zero is protocol-agnostic by design. These providers have been validated with provider-aware defaults (context window, cache behavior, model catalog):

If your endpoint speaks the Anthropic Messages API and supports streaming, Zero will drive it. Provider-specific polish (context window hinting, cache strategy, welcome-banner metadata) can be contributed via issues on this repo.

Zero is designed to be locally observable only. The CLI:

• Does not send telemetry, analytics, usage metrics, or crash reports anywhere. The internal analytics and OpenTelemetry code paths (logEvent, logOTelEvent, Statsig-style gates, GrowthBook feature flags, BigQuery exporter, Perfetto traces, session spans, plugin telemetry) are all compiled-in stubs that return immediately without writing to any network socket.
• Does not phone home for feature flags or A/B experiments. Feature-flag calls return the safe default baked into the binary.
• Does not upload conversation content, tool traces, prompts, or completions to any third party beyond the LLM provider you have explicitly configured.
• Does not require a subscription, login, or account. Authentication against your chosen provider happens directly, via a key you supply.

What is sent over the network:

1. Your API requests to the LLM provider you configured (with the key you supplied), and
2. A startup check that fetches this repository's CHANGELOG.md to render the "What's new" section of the welcome banner. This is an unauthenticated request to raw.githubusercontent.com; it contains no session or user identifiers.

That is the complete list. If you discover any code path that violates the first list, please open an issue — we consider it a privacy bug.

See CHANGELOG.md for the full release history.

The Zero CLI fetches this file at startup and shows the most recent entries in the welcome banner's What's new section.

This repo accepts issues and discussion about:

• Provider compatibility and defaults
• Documentation clarity
• Feature requests and UX friction
• Privacy or telemetry concerns

Please open an issue at paean-ai/openzero/issues.

For bugs that require reproducing against specific CLI internals, the maintainers may ask you for a zero --debug transcript or an anonymized config dump — both are produced on demand and stay on your machine unless you choose to share them.

MIT — the documentation in this repository is published under the MIT license. The Zero CLI binary on npm is also MIT-licensed.