---
title: Philosophy
path: concepts/philosophy
status: published
---

# ScaiFlux — Philosophy

**ScaiFlux is an agentic coding tool first.** Everything else — the
REPL, the slash commands, the serve-mode protocol — is the
distribution wrapper around that one product idea: a coding agent
that reaches into your workspace and *does* things, not a chat
interface that describes what you could do.

That framing decides a lot of the small choices below.

It exists to:

1. **Make the model do the work, not narrate it.** Tools (Bash, Read,
   Write, Edit, Glob, Grep, WebFetch, WebSearch, TodoWrite, …) are
   first-class — the agent invokes them inline during a turn rather
   than telling you to. Permission modes (`read-only`,
   `workspace-write`, `prompt`, `plan`) are the dial that controls
   how aggressive that gets.
2. **Be hackable.** Python's ubiquity and readability make the harness
   easy to fork, inspect, and extend without a compile step.
3. **Preserve the parity harness as the acceptance gate.** Every
   behavior change is proven against deterministic mock-service
   scenarios.
4. **Speak one wire protocol.** The inference path is OpenAI-compatible
   streaming chat completions — ScaiGrid's native surface — so the SSE
   + tool-call loop has one shape to maintain and works unchanged
   against BYO OpenAI-compat backends.
5. **Keep layering strict.** `api` ← `tools` / `runtime` ← `commands` /
   `plugins` ← `cli`. No back-references; no cycles.
6. **Prefer idiomatic Python over mechanical translation.** Async-first
   with `httpx` + `anyio`, typed with `pydantic` v2, CLI with `typer`,
   REPL with `prompt_toolkit`, rendering with `rich`.

ScaiFlux targets ScaiGrid (inference) and ScaiKey (identity). The
v0.1.0 baseline carries a single OpenAI-compatible provider repointed
at ScaiGrid.