// the find
semanser/codel
✨ Fully autonomous AI Agent that can perform complicated tasks and projects using terminal, browser, and editor.
Codel is a self-hosted autonomous coding agent — a Devin-like tool that runs terminal commands, browses the web, and edits files, all inside a sandboxed Docker container. The backend is Go with GraphQL subscriptions; the frontend is React/TypeScript. It's aimed at developers who want to self-host this kind of agent rather than pay for Devin or similar cloud products.
Docker sandboxing is the right call — agent-executed shell commands without isolation is a disaster waiting to happen, and this gets it right from the start. The Go + sqlc backend is clean: generated type-safe DB queries instead of an ORM means fewer surprises when you read the data layer. GraphQL subscriptions for real-time task streaming is a solid fit for the use case — polling would feel janky. Supporting both OpenAI and local Ollama models in a clean provider abstraction means you can actually run this air-gapped.
Last push was April 2024 — this project looks abandoned. The milestones roadmap is empty of recent activity and the Discord link may be dead. The agent prompt lives in a single Go template (`agent.tmpl`) with no visible mechanism for tool-use structured output beyond raw text parsing, which is fragile and will break on model updates. Mounting the Docker socket (`/var/run/docker.sock`) into the container is a well-known privilege escalation path — anyone with access to Codel has effective root on the host. No authentication on the web UI either, so running this on anything other than localhost is asking for trouble.