Deterministic-first coding.
The model is the last resort.
Agent Zed is a fork of Zed. Its master agent, JouleClaw, resolves most code through lookup, search, and templates — local, free, deterministic. When a model is genuinely needed, JouleClaw's rigid harness elevates whatever you point it at: a free-tier endpoint, a paid API, or an openweight model on your own hardware. The harness does the work, so the model doesn't have to be the biggest — and where others take a random walk, it stays deterministic.
Deterministic-first
The cheapest method that can close the change, wins.
JouleClaw runs every request down a cascade and stops at the first tier that can resolve it. Lookup, search, and templates — deterministic, hardware-optimized, near-free — take precedence. Generation is the exception, not the rule, and a model — any model you bring — is the very last thing tried.
The change was resolved before. A content-addressed lookup returns it instantly, for picojoules — exact, reproducible, free. The first thing JouleClaw tries.
Answerable from a search over your tree and prior changes — the nearest known solution, surfaced without generating anything new.
A formatter, a codemod, a rename, a scaffold — a transformation with one correct answer, applied by rule. No model involved.
When generation is genuinely needed, a local model runs first — on your hardware, metered in joules, nothing leaving the machine.
When nothing deterministic can close, JouleClaw invokes a model — free-tier (OpenRouter, Lightning AI), paid API, or openweight, set with your own key. Its rigid harness elevates whichever you bring. On most changes, it's never reached.
The master agent
One rigid harness that elevates every model.
The agent in charge isn't a model — it's JouleClaw. It owns the loop and wraps every model call in a rigid, effective harness: structure, retrieval, templates, and verification do the heavy lifting, so the model fills a tight, well-formed gap instead of facing a blank page. That's the meat — a free or small model inside this harness outperforms a frontier model left to wander. Which model you bring is your call.
Bring any model
Free-tier endpoints (OpenRouter, Lightning AI), paid APIs, or openweight models on your own hardware. Set your own keys, swap any time — JouleClaw is aware of all of them and locks you to none.
The harness elevates it
JouleClaw's rigid scaffolding — lookup, search, template, structured tool use, verification — is what produces quality. The model only fills the gap the harness leaves, so a modest or free model becomes genuinely effective.
Cheaper, and it shows
Because the deterministic tiers close most work and the harness elevates whatever runs, the model can be the cheapest one that fits. The receipt shows exactly when a model was — and wasn't — needed.
Energy tracking
Every change in real joules — on every hardware ecosystem.
Deterministic tiers cost almost nothing; generation costs real energy. JouleClaw meters the work from the host's own counter wherever the hardware exposes one, so the status line — ⚡ N J this session — shows you precisely when you needed the expensive path and when you didn't. The same probe, the same way, across the ecosystems developers use.
| Hardware | Counter | Provenance | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Silicon | IOReport Energy Model | ModelBased | 25.5 W / 74 J |
| Windows + RTX 2060 | NVML | HwShunt | 9.4 W / 18.8 J |
| Linux x86 + Tesla T4 | NVML | HwShunt | 71.8 W / 148 J |
| Linux x86 Xeon | RAPL powercap | HwShunt | 77.1 W / 154 J |
Verified on real silicon. Each reading declares its provenance — HwShunt for a hardware counter, ModelBased for a vendor energy model — so the number is honest about how it was known.
Code traceability
Every edit is an object you can name, sign, and account for.
JouleClaw captures each change as a content-addressed, signed coding operation with a receipt — not a disposable diff. The full provenance of your code: what changed, on what base, at which tier, for how much energy.
- op
- b3:Ynpl53wU4pwfokr8h2c…
- prior
- b3:8fK2q9Lm4nRtZ0xV…
- tier
- L1 · Template
- energy
- 0.004 J · HwShunt
- sig
- ed25519 ✓ verified
Content-addressed
Every change JouleClaw produces is named by its BLAKE3 hash (b3:…) over a canonical encoding. The same change always has the same id — a stable fingerprint for every edit.
Signed & attributed
Each operation is an Ed25519-signed transition bound to the prior state of the tree. Who changed what, on what base, by what tier — provable, not assumed.
Receipted
Each change carries a receipt: the tier that produced it and the joules it cost, with honest provenance. You can see whether a lookup or a frontier model did the work.
Reproducible by construction
The deterministic tiers — lookup, search, template — give the same output for the same input, every time. Most of your history is replayable, not a random walk.
The pillars
Built on the family pillars of Transaction Science.
The deterministic discipline, the energy meter, and the signed trail aren't bolted on — they come from open standards Agent Zed is built on. Each pillar is a spec with a real reference implementation, shared across the family.
JouleClaw
The master agent. It owns the loop — the deterministic-first cascade, the on-device runtime, the energy meter — and wraps every model call in a rigid harness that elevates whatever you bring, free-tier or frontier.
Joule Code
The open standard the cascade speaks: content-addressed, signed coding operations, the L0–L4 tiers, and JCR-1 receipts. Agent Zed is its reference consumer.
Transaction Science
The family the pillars come from — open standards that make digital work content-addressed, signed, metered, and conformance-defined. Agent Zed stands on them.
Get it
Install Agent Zed.
A fork of Zed, in the open — Apache-2.0 lineage, pinned to the Transaction Science pillars by git revision. Install it, connect a model key, and let JouleClaw reach for the deterministic answer first.
Apple Silicon & Intel. Or the .dmg from Releases.
x86_64 & arm64, after adding the apt repo. Or .deb / .tar.gz.
x86_64 & arm64, after scoop bucket add transaction-science …. Or the .exe installer / portable .zip from Releases.