100% free + open · terminal native

Use context and compute deliberately.

Cercano is a premium agent harness for working with frontier and open-weight models—separately or together.

brew install cercano-ai/cercano/cercanoInstall now

A polished terminal, built-in workflows, and deliberate routing put every kind of model inside one coherent way of working.

An agent designed around the work.

01 / ROUTING

The right model for the job.

Context and compute are choices, not defaults.

Cercano routes work by capability, quality, and destination. Keep demanding reasoning with a frontier model, move bounded work to an efficient model, or run it locally.

Read the feature guide
02 / DELEGATION

Delegate work. Keep your focus.

Subagents work in parallel without crowding the main conversation.

Dispatch research, implementation, and verification into separate, scoped contexts. Open any subagent in its own tab, follow its progress, and bring back only what matters.

Read the feature guide
02Dispatch bounded work, then inspect each agent in its own terminal tab.
03 / WORKFLOWS

Process, not just a prompt.

Good agent work is a sequence of deliberate moves.

Research, planning, subagent execution, systematic debugging, and design decisions are built into the harness. The process stays visible and repeatable instead of living in one oversized instruction.

Read the feature guide
04 / CONTEXT

Catch up without starting over.

Long sessions keep moving while context is managed in the background.

Layered summaries and non-blocking compaction preserve decisions, current state, and useful history. You can leave, return, and understand where the work stands.

Read the feature guide
05 / METRICS

Know where the tokens go.

Usage should be legible enough to change a decision.

See token use by provider, model, source, and time. Cercano makes the tradeoffs between local, efficient, and frontier inference concrete.

Read the feature guide
05Inspect model and provider usage without leaving the terminal.
06 / LOCAL

Put local models to work.

Open-weight models belong inside the workflow, not beside it.

Cercano manages a local runtime and makes local inference a first-class destination for delegated work, private tasks, and zero-cost iteration.

Read the feature guide
07 / PROVIDERS

Choose your frontier provider.

Use subscription sign-in, API credentials, or compatible endpoints.

Provider choice remains separate from the coding workflow around it. Switch the underlying model or endpoint without rebuilding how you work.

Read the feature guide
08 / TERMINAL

A terminal that stays readable.

The interface is dense where it helps and quiet everywhere else.

Responsive layouts, rich formatting, visible tool activity, context meters, subagent tabs, and carefully tuned themes make long sessions comfortable.

Read the feature guide
08A polished terminal interface, including the palettes behind this site.
09 / SESSIONS

Resume the session, not the setup.

History is useful when it is searchable and ready to continue.

Automatic titles, saved sessions, search, and resume keep ongoing work close. Pick up the thread without reconstructing the task from memory.

Read the feature guide
09Find a previous session and continue from the terminal.
10 / ARCHITECTURE

One agent. More than one client.

The interface and the durable agent core are separate.

An independent service owns sessions, tools, and model access. The terminal stays fast and focused, while headless clients and future interfaces can use the same agent.

Read the feature guide
ClientsTerminal UIHeadless
CoreAgent servicesessions · tools · state
ModelsFrontierOpen weight
11 / OPEN SOURCE

Free to use. Open to inspect.

Cercano is 100% free and open source under Apache 2.0.

Run it, study it, extend it, and make it your own. The complete agent, terminal, workflows, and local-runtime integration live in the public repository.

Read the license

Install in one line.

Homebrew installation is available now for macOS. Package-manager releases for Linux and Windows are next.

HomebrewAvailable now
$ brew install cercano-ai/cercano/cercano

Then run cercano. Configure providers, local models, routing, and permissions from inside the TUI.

aptLinux · coming soon
ChocolateyWindows · coming soon

Context is a resource.
Spend it well.