agent-joule — Joule Code reference consumer

agent-joule is the reference editor for Joule Code, the Transaction Science open standard for energy-attributed, federated, no-phone-home agentic coding. It is a hard fork of the Zed editor, stripped of its cloud ties and rebuilt around the Joule Code commitments: drive vendors' own logged-in coding agents over ACP, meter every turn in joules, and never phone home.

It is not a paid coding tool with a token markup. The protocol is owned by no one; agent-joule is one (SOTA) implementation of it.

What it does

• Federates frontier coding agents. Connect Claude Code, Gemini, or Codex from one panel. agent-joule launches the vendor's own logged-in CLI over the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) — the vendor's client owns its credential; agent-joule never sees or transports a token. These agents are the Joule Code cascade's L4 (Wire) tier.
• Meters energy. Every session surfaces a real joule-code-receipt::Receipt: ⚡ N J this session (est.) · L4. The number is computed from the agent's actual reported token usage; the est. is honest — it is an Estimator reading because no hardware energy interface is in the path yet (Joule Code SPEC §6). When a metered backend is present, the same surface shows a measured figure.
• Does not phone home. Sign-in, telemetry, crash upload, and auto-update are removed; a build-level egress backstop makes Joule-host URLs unreachable; the ACP-registry auto-fetch is off. Startup is network-silent — verified by packet capture. See PRIVACY_HARDENING.md.

Joule Code conformance

agent-joule implements the Joule Code v0.1 commitments it is positioned to carry — the no-capture posture (verified) and a live receipt surface — and binds the federation legs as the cascade's L4 tier. The full clause-by-clause map (what is implemented, partial, and pending) is in JOULE_CODE.md. The standard's lean reference library (joule-code-rs) and conformance suite live in the open-standards repository; agent-joule consumes it as a dependency rather than vendoring a copy.

Build and run

cargo build --bin agent-joule
./target/debug/agent-joule

Open the federation panel with ctrl-cmd-a. Connecting an agent requires that vendor's CLI to be installed and logged in (e.g. claude, gemini); registry agents are fetched via npx on first connect. A local OpenAI-compatible model (e.g. vLLM at localhost:8000) is registered as a direct provider — the cascade's L3 (local model) tier.

For building on each platform, the upstream Joule development guides still apply: macOS, Linux, Windows.

Licence

agent-joule inherits Joule's GPL-3.0-or-later licence (LICENSE-GPL; portions Apache-2.0, LICENSE-APACHE). The Joule Code standard it consumes is separately and permissively licensed (Apache-2.0 reference code, CC-BY-4.0 spec text); a GPL reference editor consuming a permissive standard is intentional.

License information for third-party dependencies must be correctly provided for CI to pass; agent-joule retains Joule's cargo-about setup under script/licenses/.

Upstream

agent-joule is a hard fork of zed-industries/zed, a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter, developed by Zed Industries, Inc. All credit for the editor foundation is theirs. agent-joule diverges in one direction: removing the cloud dependencies and building the Joule Code substrate in their place. Upstream documentation, contribution guidance, and community links live at zed.dev and the upstream repository.