# smol

9 Hacker News commenters recommended smol and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** A minimal open source coding agent that is small, light on CPU and RAM, and easy to read and adapt. Critics note it lacks subagents and a system prompt, and its size hurts caching.

## Why people recommend it

- Minimal, simple, compact codebase (4 comments): "an open source agent that uses a minimal amount of CPU and RAM and has source that is easy to audit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256795)) "smol is very minimal only using stdlib" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256858)) "Smol is simple and compact." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386237))
- Easy to read and adapt (4 comments): "if you want to see what a simple harness implementation looks like you can just dive into the code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467073)) "you can read each run step by step and see what the agents are doing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170962)) "because smol is so smol you can adapt it easily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180757))
- Alternative to Docker isolation (2 comments): "that's a great way to leverage hypervisor isolation to avoid those issues" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48098194)) "definitely enjoying smol. this is a very nice alternative to docker" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769551))
- Fits easily in context window (2 comments): "it fits into the context window with plenty of room to spare" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49178339)) "look at minimal agents that protect the context window" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49221496))

## What people warn about

- Missing subagents and system prompt (2 comments): "smol currently is very simple so it definitely does less things, like no subagent orchestration" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138584)) "in smol (minimalist agent harness) there currently is no system prompt at all" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320557))
- Weak caching and token efficiency (2 comments): "so in this specific case the count of uncached tokens for smol makes it look worse than it actually is" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138330)) "the token efficiency hurts cache use as caching only starts at 1024 tokens" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138378))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Pi coding agent](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pi.md): 892 recommend
- [omp (oh-my-pi)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/omp.md): 80 recommend
- [ForgeCode](https://hackerapproved.com/p/forge.md): 39 recommend
- [Reasonix](https://hackerapproved.com/p/reasonix.md): 26 recommend
- [DSH](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dsh.md): 11 recommend

## Cite as

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