# Maki

30 Hacker News commenters recommended Maki and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a fast, lightweight Rust terminal coding agent that runs well on small servers and parses shell permissions; the most common caveat is its curl-to-shell install script.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast, lightweight Rust build (6 comments): "Love using maki on 500mb and 1gb ram tiny vps's where opencode sometimes could go OOM." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49371418)) "you can use maki.sh (written in rust) as compared to opencode/claude-code etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052958)) "But I like it, code processing is freaking fast." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595614))
- Preferred over OpenCode and pi (4 comments): "Maki is awesome. Thanks! I'm using it on my X220 and it flies in comparison to OpenCode et al." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591839)) "I already found maki which...seems to do the exact same job pi did for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331301)) "I also have become a maki convert and I really like it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48592741))
- Parses bash permissions safely (3 comments): "Maki uses tree-sitter to parse the bash command and figure out the permissions requested are git * and rm *." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979334)) "Well done for actually parsing the shell commands the LLM wants to execute" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728458)) "The bash permission parsing is what sold me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702608))
- Low cost with cheap models (2 comments): "Thanks for harnesses like maki the cost is lower compared to OpenCode or Cursor." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48985109)) "with 100% ds4-flash it's extremely powerful and super cheap" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182348))

## What people warn about

- Awkward curl-to-shell install (3 comments): "I just wish it wouldn't ask me to pipe an install script directly to shell to install." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182431)) "it was still a bit of an hassle to install maki.sh" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49920677)) "maki you curl an install script into bash" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49657523))
- Terminal copy-paste limitations (2 comments): "copy-paste is broken (no middle-click paste, or copy to PRIMARY" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50072744)) "terminal have limitations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755420))

## 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, "Maki", https://hackerapproved.com/p/maki/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).