CometixCode reimplements Claude Code's terminal UI in Rust, and reached 292 stars in six hours

A developer publishing under the handle Haleclipse pushed CometixCode to GitHub at 08:58 UTC on 20 September. It calls itself "a terminal-based AI coding assistant, written in Rust as a 1:1 reimplementation of Anthropic's Claude Code," released under AGPL-3.0-only. The GitHub REST API reports 292 stars, 16 forks and one watcher six hours after creation, with the last push at 13:28 UTC. The project is not affiliated with Anthropic.

What is actually reimplemented

Claude Code's terminal user interface is written in TypeScript on React with the Ink renderer. CometixCode reproduces it in Rust on iocraft, a React-style retained-mode TUI framework the author calls the structural counterpart of Ink: components, hooks, declarative elements. The README says the port "follows the original file by file rather than reinventing the architecture: a TypeScript component maps to a Rust component, a hook to a hook, and deliberate deviations are recorded in the source where they happen."

It builds against CometixTUI, a fork of iocraft that carries primitives the port needed: row-level diffing, event propagation, SIGCONT self-healing, IME cursor handling, bracketed paste and grid layout.

The README describes the port as a work in progress: "Large parts of the interactive loop, tool execution, permissions, MCP and slash commands are implemented; other areas are partial." Building requires Rust 1.87 or newer on edition 2024, plus ICU4C through pkg-config.

Why the licence choice matters

CometixCode is AGPL-3.0-only, which the README calls out directly: "if you run a modified version as a network service, its users are entitled to the modified source." Anthropic's own Claude Code CLI is released under its commercial terms of service, so choosing a copyleft that covers network use is a deliberate move. Anyone who runs a hosted product built on a modified CometixCode has to publish the modifications.

File search follows Claude Code's own arrangement: call the external ripgrep binary rather than compile it in. The main executable is called cometix.

There has been no independent Rust client of the Claude Code interface until now. This one is new, unofficial and incomplete, and the author says so at the top of the README. But the port targets the same public interface Claude Code exposes to a terminal user, so a team that wants to add a feature the official CLI does not carry, run the client on a machine where the Node runtime is a problem, or study how the assistant loop is built now has source to read and change.

Source

Primary: Haleclipse/CometixCode on GitHub. Traction figures from the GitHub REST API at 15:07 UTC on 20 September.