A lightweight coding agent built from scratch in TypeScript and Node.js, to understand how AI coding agents work internally.

Kern is an educational project. Instead of treating a coding agent as a black box, it rebuilds the main pieces one at a time: the agent loop, the provider layer, the tools, and the safety checks around them. The goal isn’t another chatbot. It’s to see how an LLM becomes an agent once it can use tools, read the results, and keep going.

Kern is a work in progress. It works end to end today, and the roadmap at the bottom lists what’s next.