# Dirac

11 Hacker News commenters recommended Dirac and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Open-source coding agent people recommend for token efficiency and fast refactoring on large codebases. Common caveat: it still feels rough, with bugs and missing integrations.

## Why people recommend it

- Novel hash-anchored code editing (3 comments): "Uses a novel approach to hash-anchoring that reduces the overhead of hash anchors to a minimum" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702618)) "How come dirac's advance code editing technique is not being by Claude or Codex" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343703)) "The hashing and other optimizations in Direct seem kind of brilliant" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944650))
- Token-efficient, cheaper than alternatives (2 comments): "The entire goal is to be token efficient (over 50% cheaper)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739960)) "with the sole focus on token efficiency" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47893982))
- Productive on large refactoring tasks (2 comments): "Dirac wins there significantly on those tasks because they are mostly refactoring related" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48885809)) "dirac is more productive on large codebase refactoring than OpenCode" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47922590))

## What people warn about

- Buggy, unfinished tooling (3 comments): "The line-based anchors were slightly buggy though" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423364)) "it's very cool but the tooling isn't there yet" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926110)) "quite OK but seems like full of bugs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48779038))
- Missing support for some logins and CLIs (2 comments): "there isn't support for gemini-cli login" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925896)) "I keep trying to use dirac-cli with codex and it won't work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921705))
- Doubts about claimed token savings (2 comments): "I couldn't even close to reproduce their benchmark results using the exact model and their harness." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49657653)) "My conclusion is that the efficiency dirac sees comes mainly from showing file skeleton by default" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47923140))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [GitHub Copilot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github-copilot.md): 571 recommend
- [oh-my-pi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/oh-my-pi.md): 104 recommend
- [Grok Build CLI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grok-build.md): 66 recommend
- [DeepSeek Harness](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-harness.md): 63 recommend
- [Claude Code VS Code extension](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-code-vs-code-extension.md): 31 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Dirac", https://hackerapproved.com/p/dirac/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).