Glossary · Headless Coding Agents (CI Mode)

Headless Coding Agents (CI Mode).

Agents that run where no terminal watches.

Direct answer

Headless mode runs the agentic loop without a TUI (scripted prompts, piped I/O, machine-readable exit codes) for CI pipelines, cron jobs, and batch refactors. The discipline: deterministic scoping (plan files in, diffs out), approval policy per environment (--yolo only where revert is cheap), and memory-aware runs where past failures inform this run. Read-only plan mode previews changes without touching the tree.

In Anvaya

How We Implement It.

01Headless Coding Agents (CI Mode)anv --no-tui --yolo with exit codes 0/1/2 (denied), pipeable I/O, --plan-only read-only exploration, timestamped backups before mutations.

Questions

Asked About Headless Coding Agents (CI Mode).

Q

When is --yolo safe?

Where revert is one command (git-clean trees), scopes are narrow, and tests gate merges. Never on unreviewed production paths.

Q

How do headless runs stay cheap?

Spec-in/task-out discipline: fresh session per job with a written spec, packed memory instead of transcripts, quiet command flags.

Q

What should CI agents never do?

Force-push, broad auto-merge, secret-adjacent work, and unscoped network writes. Gate writes, log everything.

Run Agents That Fit On Your Laptop.

25.6 MB median RSS. 25 agents ran in parallel on a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM. Hundreds on your machine. Zero cloud required on the Ollama path.

Requires Rust/cargo to build from source. Linux and macOS today, Windows not yet supported. Pre-1.0, public beta. Pricing TBD.