Rufous

What is Rufous

Rufous is a coding agent framework designed for small local models in the 2B–12B parameter range. It is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license and requires no account.

How to use

1. Install with: curl -fsSL https://rufous.chat/install.sh | sh (or download a release for macOS, Linux or Windows from GitHub).
2. Run a local model, e.g. ollama pull qwen3.5:4b (Ollama, LM Studio, llama-server or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint).
3. Check your setup with rufous doctor.
4. Start the local web UI with rufous serve, or chat in the terminal with rufous chat.
5. Hand it a task file to run unattended: rufous run qwen3.5:4b task.md ~/code/project.
6. Use it inside Zed (or another ACP client) with rufous acp --model qwen3.5:4b.
7. Approve or deny tool calls through the inline permission cards;
8. turn on Offline mode to disable cloud providers, web tools and remote MCP servers.

Use cases

• Agentic coding with small 2B–12B local models Running a coding agent fully on your own machine without an account Using a local agent inside the Zed editor via ACP Running unattended tasks from a task file in the terminal Catching when a small model claims work it never did, via a tool-call Record Switching to a cloud provider for a hard task and back to local

Price from official sources

Free

• Free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license;
• no account needed.

Check the official site for current pricing · Price not yet checked by our editors

Source: rufous.chat · Info as of Nov 2, 2026

Social

• github