Claude Code burns ~33k tokens on startup and drags a whole Node runtime with it. fx is Vercel Labs betting on the opposite extreme: a coding agent as one native binary — 7.8MiB, 10 microsecond cold start, single-digit megabytes of memory. Originally an internal Vercel tool, now Apache-2.0 on GitHub: 1.2k stars in days, 199 points on HackerNews.
A harness, not another terminal IDE
The CLI feels like a Unix shell, not a heavyweight TUI. But the real positioning is “embeddable harness”: something you drop into agent sandboxes, CI, or resource-constrained environments where packing hundreds of agent instances per machine actually matters. Model and provider agnostic, local or cloud inference. No telemetry — sessions stay on your machine.
How you plug into it
One curl command installs it. For embedding, there’s a WebAssembly SDK (fx-core.wasm), Agent Client Protocol for editor integration, plus MCP and subagent support. Your app supplies the network transport and permissions; fx supplies the agent loop.
The honest catch: inference currently routes through Vercel AI Gateway, and HN called that lock-in loudly. More providers are promised. If they land, this becomes the SQLite of coding agents.
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