Crush is an open-source terminal AI coding agent from Charm — the team behind Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Glamour. Built in Go, it has ~28K GitHub stars and focuses on developer experience: a beautiful split-pane TUI, LSP integration, MCP support, and session persistence.
Why It's in Trial
Crush earns its place alongside Claude Code and Gemini CLI as a well-crafted terminal-first agent with a few meaningful differentiations:
- LSP integration: Ties into Language Server Protocol servers to inject type-aware context into prompts — understands function signatures, type dependencies, and project structure beyond raw file content
- Session persistence: Maintains multiple named sessions per project, preserving conversation history and file context across runs
- MCP protocol: Full MCP support via stdio, HTTP, or SSE — same extension model as Claude Code and Gemini CLI
- Skills system: Reusable skill folders (
SKILL.md) that Crush discovers and activates on demand — similar to Claude Code's slash commands - Charm aesthetic: True to Charm's design ethos — split-pane diff view, keyboard navigation, desktop notifications when idle. The TUI is intentionally polished for developers who live in the terminal
- Multi-model: Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Gemini, Bedrock, Azure, or any OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible endpoint without losing session context
- Cross-platform: macOS, Linux, Windows (PowerShell + WSL), plus BSDs
Compared to Claude Code / Gemini CLI
Crush occupies the same terminal-agent niche as Claude Code but is provider-agnostic and open-source. Its LSP integration is ahead of most peers. The tradeoff: smaller community and less mature tooling compared to Claude Code's first-party Anthropic backing.
Safety
By default Crush prompts for permission before each tool call. --yolo skips all prompts — useful for CI but risky in interactive use. Desktop notifications fire when the terminal isn't focused, keeping humans in the loop on long-running tasks.
Key Characteristics
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Interface | Terminal (TUI) |
| License | FSL-1.1-MIT (source-available) |
| Underlying model | OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Gemini, Bedrock, Azure, any compatible endpoint |
| Pricing | Free (BYOK) |
| Sandbox | Host terminal (no isolation; --yolo bypasses all prompts) |
| Provider | Charm (charmbracelet) |
| GitHub stars | ~28.1k (September 2026) |
| Website | charm.land |
| GitHub | charmbracelet/crush |