harvey

Harvey is a terminal-based coding agent written in Go. It connects to an Ollama server (or other supported providers) to provide an interactive REPL for working with language models, with all operations sandboxed to a workspace directory. The name comes from Mary Chase’s play about a Púca — Harvey is a small, local agent for small computers. See Vision for the philosophy behind the project.

Security Note

Harvey is experimental — a working proof of concept, not production-ready software. Letting a probabilistic model direct command execution is an inherently risky attack surface; Harvey mitigates this with safe mode, workspace sandboxing, permission checks, audit logging, and security reviews with each release, but the risk is never zero. Don’t use Harvey where the risks might endanger your data, people, or planet. See SECURITY.md for details.

Features

Core Capabilities

• Interactive terminal REPL for language models, sandboxed to a workspace directory
• Auto-execute: tagged code blocks in model replies are written to files automatically
• HARVEY.md provides a customizable system prompt per workspace

Knowledge, Memory & Sessions

• Three-silo memory: RAG vector stores, session-experience memory with rolling summaries, and a SQLite knowledge base
• Sessions recorded as human-readable Fountain screenplay (.spmd) files — replay, continue, or mine them for memories
• Pinned context and conversation summarization to manage the context window

Multi-Model & Routing

• Llamafile integration
• Ollama integration
• Cloud model routes for Anthropic, DeepSeek, Gemini, Mistral, and OpenAI
• Multi-model routing via @mention dispatch and model aliasing

Security

• Safe mode with a command allowlist and fine-grained workspace permissions
• API key filtering from child processes and an in-memory audit log

File & Code Support

• Code-aware RAG chunking, doc extraction, and ANSI syntax highlighting (13 languages)
• Automatic code formatting on write_file (gofmt, clang-format, black, rustfmt, prettier, and built-in Pascal/Oberon/Basic formatters)
• Git integration and PDF text extraction

Extensibility

• SKILL.md skills, bundled skill sets, and multi-step prompt pipelines

Quick Start

1. Install: Run the installer for your platform

   • Linux/macOS: ./installer.sh
   • Windows: Run installer.ps1 in PowerShell

2. Run: harvey

3. Try it:

   harvey > /read LICENSE
   harvey > /help

See Installation for detailed instructions.

Platform Support

Harvey runs on: - Linux: x86_64, aarch64, armv7l - macOS: Intel and Apple Silicon (M1 and above) - Windows: x86_64 - Raspberry Pi OS

Software Requirements

• LLamafile models or Ollama plus Ollama Models

Software Suggestions

For building Harvey and documentation from source:

• Go >= 1.26.4
• CMTools >= 0.0.46
• Pandoc >= 3.9
• GNU Make >= 3.8

Documentation

• GitHub Repository — Source code
• User Manual — Main documentation index
• Overview — What Harvey is, why you might use it, and how to get started
• Developer Guide — Architecture, conventions, and contributing
• Reference Manual — Command and configuration reference
• Installation — Get Harvey installed on your system
• Getting Started — First session, keyboard shortcuts, slash commands
• About — Project metadata and version information
• Vision — Philosophy, motivation, and future direction

Release Notes

• version: 0.0.13

• status: active

• released: 2026-06-19

• Added multi-language code-aware chunking for RAG ingestion (C, C++, Pascal, Oberon, Lisp, Basic)

• Added documentation extraction: comment and docstring association with symbols for C, C++, Pascal, Oberon, Lisp, Basic

• Added ANSI syntax highlighting of code blocks in LLM responses (13 languages: C, C++, Pascal, Oberon, Lisp, Basic, Go, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Shell, SQL); configurable via syntax_highlight in harvey.yaml

• Added automatic code formatting on write_file: built-in formatters for Pascal, Oberon, Basic; external pipe-mode formatters for Go (gofmt), C/C++ (clang-format), Python (black), Rust (rustfmt), JavaScript/TypeScript (prettier); configurable via auto_format in harvey.yaml

• Added /format FILE [FILE...] command to manually format workspace source files in-place

See CHANGES.md for detailed release history.

Authors

• R. S. Doiel

License

AGPL-3.0

Getting Help

• GitHub Issues — Bug reports and feature requests