Show HN: Runner – the anti-vibe coding agent | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Runner – the anti-vibe coding agent

runnercode.com

22 pointszmccormick710 comments

Now that AI is capable of writing large volumes of production-quality code, our role as developers is changing. Our primary job is no longer writing code. It’s planning and communicating software design and architecture. We have to do this collaboratively with agents and then review and iterate on their implementations.

IDEs were not built for this workflow. So about three months ago I decided to try to build what I thought this new interface should look like.

Runner is a coding agent purpose-built for this new “plan and review” workflow. It’s not for vibe coding. It’s for professional software developers who are responsible for the code they ship.

It encourages and supports a more structured and controlled workflow than other coding agents. It’s built around the concept of tasks. A task is a small, clearly scoped change. The planning agent creates and edits task specs, and then you can assign them to coding agents once you’re happy with the plan. When the coding agent finishes, you can review the changes via the built-in diff viewer. If you’re happy with them you can approve the changes, which will trigger a git commit.

Runner is available as a free BYOK beta for MacOS right now. You can learn more and download it here: https://runnercode.com/. You will need at least a Gemini API key, and for best performance also an OpenAI API key.

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Interesting, will check it out.

A persistent issue I have with Cursor et al. is that they hallucinate function arguments when using a function or method from a library. It seems like automatically pulling the library's documentation into the context would be helpful, but I haven't found any tool that does this automatically. Is there any chance that Runner does this?

It doesn't seem like this was the problem you were trying to solve, but reliable use of libraries and APIs is a critical problem to solve if you want LLM-generated code to work.

I agree that's a major problem. It's not something I've solved yet. I suspect a web research sub-agent is likely what's needed, so it can pull in up-to-date docs for whatever library you need to work with.

I’ve largely solved this with the context7 mcp server. Any time my prompt is likely to touch apis I know the LLM will get wrong I tell it to review the docs with context7 first.

Good to know. I've heard great things about Context7, but haven't experimented with it yet.

Cool stuff! This looks quite similar to https://traycer.ai/

I think there's probably a lot of value to be gained in tooling for coding agents that codify and enhance the describe -> explore -> plan -> refine -> implement -> verify cycle. With most popular tools (cursor, claude code, roo, augment, windsurf, etc) you have to do this workflow "manually" usually by having the model write out .md files, it isn't super smooth.

Cool, I hadn't heard of Traycer. That does look quite similar!

Completely agree. I basically built Runner to codify the process I was already using manually with Claude Code and Gemini. A lot of developers seem to be settling on a similar workflow, so I'm betting that something like Runner or Traycer will be useful for a lot of devs.

I'll be curious to see how far the existing players like Cursor push in this direction.

> You will need at least a Gemini API key, and for best performance also an OpenAI API key.

Could you explain why both / why not also Claude (why not all three?)

Gemini is required for the context management sub-agent. You can use any of OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini for the main planning and coding agents, but GPT-5 performs the best in my experience. Claude 4 Sonnet works well too, but it's about twice as expensive.

Tried downloading it from my M2 macbook pro 2 times and failed

As in the download itself didn't happen when you clicked the download button, or the installation failed?

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