Press kit

Assets, facts, and a summary you can paste.

Everything here is current as of crab 0.4.0. The numbers are countable from the repository, not rounded for effect.

Editorial summary

crab

crab is a coding agent for the terminal, written in Rust and inspired by pi. It ships as a single ~12 MiB binary with seven tools, an MCP client and skills discovery.

Its distinguishing feature is self-hosting. The acceptance criterion set at design time was one commit whose diff was produced entirely by crab — reached at f3fec8e, with 21 of the first 190 commits following the same pattern, each reviewed by a human before it merged.

Sessions are append-only JSONL files that act as the single source of truth: messages the model saw, plus typed observation records it never sees. Two subcommands read that log back — crab trace for the span tree, crab metrics for tokens, cost and latency against an editable, versioned price table.

It installs like pi: a managed installer fetches a precompiled binary, keeps versions side-by-side under ~/.crab/install/releases/, and crab update self-updates with checksum-verified downloads. No Rust toolchain is needed.

crab itself is free and open source — Apache-2.0, with no licence fee, no subscription, no account, no seat count and no telemetry. It speaks any OpenAI-compatible endpoint and has no hosted service of its own. The only thing that costs money is the model you configure, billed to you directly by your provider.

The site you are reading is also a crab output — its generator, stylesheet, script and prose were written by crab, then reviewed and pushed by a human. Same division of labour as the product's own commit history.

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Fact sheet

Field	Value
Name	crab
What it is	Terminal coding agent (agent harness)
Version	0.4.0
Written in	Rust, edition 2024, 2-crate workspace
Size	~12 MiB release binary; CI ceiling 16 MiB
License	Apache-2.0
Cost of crab	Free. No licence fee, subscription, account or seat count.
What costs money	The model you configure, billed by your provider; crab takes no cut
Platforms	macOS arm64; Linux x86_64 and arm64
Distribution	Managed installer (precompiled binary, no Rust needed), a source build, or Releases
Providers	Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint; MCP for extra tools
Tools	read, write, edit, bash, glob, grep, web_fetch
Data	JSONL sessions + SQLite ledger, both local
Lines of Rust	~16,700
Cold start	~5 ms (`crab --version`); pi 1.3.0 is ~150 ms on the same machine
Tests	356 (3 ignored: 2 self-spawn round trips, 1 subprocess helper)
Commits produced by crab	21 at v0.4.0 (see docs/dogfood-log.md)
Author	jinpeng
Website	crabagent.ai
This website	written by crab; generator, CSS, JS and prose all its output

Logo

Mark, lockup, card.

The mark is stroke-only on purpose — it stays legible at 16 px, where the original pincer silhouette turns to mush.

{site_mark()}

mark · currentColor

favicon.svg

lockup · horizontal

logo.svg

social · 1200×630

social.svg

Figures

Terminal stills.

Reproduce either by running the command shown. Both follow real output from crab 0.4.0.

crab trace

run 0 · 63 spans
├── ✓ llm  deepseek-chat · 5663ms · ↑254 ↓257.7k (cr0 cw257.7k)
├── ✓ tool bash · 5392ms │ cargo test -p crab-cli
└── ✓ llm  deepseek-chat · 2896ms · ↑275 ↓258.8k (cr257.9k cw921)

FIG. 01 — span tree

crab metrics

crab metrics · last 7 day(s)

BY DAY
  2026-10-22  turns   2  ↑3.6k ↓309.2k  cost $0.0064  p90 5481ms
  2026-10-21  turns  41  ↑38.1k ↓4.2M   cost $0.0917  p90 8940ms

BY MODEL
  deepseek-chat  turns 104  ↑92.1k ↓11.2M  cost $0.2318
  local-model    turns   3  ↑2.1k  ↓41.0k   cost −

FIG. 02 — cost and latency

Palette

One orange, a lot of paper.

The accent is taken from the crab shell mark. Everything else is ink on warm paper, with hairlines instead of boxes and no shadows.

#F94D15
accent

#17150F
ink

#FBFAF7
paper

#E6E1D6
rule

Contact

Who to ask.

Press & general: press@crabagent.ai
Security: security@crabagent.ai
Bugs & features: Issue tracker
Source: github.com/jinpeng/crab-agent

Please link to crabagent.ai rather than rehosting the docs, and keep the version number in screenshots honest. If you quote the self-hosting figure, quote the caveat with it: the diff is crab's, the review and commit are the human's.