💡 What is Phonton?

Every AI coding assistant makes you trade privacy for autonomy. To get an agentic experience, you either hand your code to a SaaS vendor's proxy servers, or settle for inline autocompletion.

Phonton is the first tool to deliver both: fully agentic development and absolute, uncompromising privacy.

Phonton runs as a local-first, headless-ready terminal tool. Your code never leaves your machine. Your API keys go straight to Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or Ollama. No intermediate proxy, no telemetry hooks, and no subscription required.

🌟 Core Differentiators

1. Zero-Telemetry BYOK (Bring Your Own Key)

Phonton is proxy-free. Requests go directly to api.anthropic.com, api.openai.com, generativelanguage.googleapis.com, or your local ollama daemon. Phonton never intercepts your keys and never touches your code in transit. You can packet-capture the network to verify.

2. The Strict 4-Layer Verification Gate

Unlike other tools that silently write code and let LLM hallucinations ship, Phonton enforces a strict verification gate. Every diff must pass through four layers before it is marked as review-ready:

1. Tree-Sitter Syntax check
2. Crate check (cargo check)
3. Workspace Check (Lints & Format)
4. Automated Test suite execution
5. Interactive Browser rendering check (Playwright checks + Screenshots in v0.19.0)

On failure, verifier diagnostics are surgically fed back to the worker for recursive repair loops.

3. Multi-Model Intelligence Routing

Phonton routes subtasks by complexity using tiered model mapping (Local ➔ Cheap ➔ Standard ➔ Frontier). It automatically escalates to a more powerful model only on verify failure. You pay pennies for boilerplate and invoke frontier intelligence only when a task demands it.

4. Semantic Memory Across Sessions

Phonton maintains a persistent SQLite store of architectural decisions, rejected approaches, and task history. The planner consults this memory on every goal decomposition, ensuring it never re-attempts approaches that failed before and builds upon approved design patterns.

⚡ Quick Install

The easiest path to install is via npm. The wrapper automatically downloads the prebuilt binary for your platform.

# Install globally
npm install -g phonton-cli

# Verify your installation
phonton version
phonton doctor

Alternative Installers

• Shell Script (macOS/Linux):

  curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phonton-dev/phonton-cli/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

• PowerShell (Windows):

  & ([scriptblock]::Create((irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phonton-dev/phonton-cli/main/scripts/install.ps1)))

• Cargo (From Source):

  cargo install --git https://github.com/phonton-dev/phonton-cli --tag v0.19.0 phonton-cli --locked --force

⚖️ How We Compare

| Feature | Phonton CLI | Claude Code | Cursor | Aider | |---|---|---|---|---| | Privacy Model | 100% Direct (No Proxy) | Anthropic Proxy | Cursor Proxy | Direct (No Proxy) | | Telemetry | Zero | Opt-out | Opt-out | Optional | | Multi-Model Support | All (BYOK & Local) | Anthropic Only | Pre-selected | Many | | Subscription Fee | $0 (Open Source) | Usage-based | $20/month | $0 (Open Source) | | Execution Loop | Full Plan/Edit/Verify | Interactive Chat | Interactive Chat | Interactive Chat | | Verification Gates | Mandatory 4-Layer | Manual/Run Command | Manual | Optional | | Memory Spine | Semantic SQLite | None | Simple Context | None |

🔄 The Autonomous ADE Loop

flowchart TD
    Goal["Goal (User Request)"] --> Plan["1. Goal Decomposition (Planner)"]
    Plan --> Graph["2. PlanGraph & Conflict Groups Staged"]
    Graph --> Dispatch["3. Concurrent / Serialized Worker Dispatch"]
    Dispatch --> Edit["4. Bounded Code Modifications (Diff-Only)"]
    Edit --> Verify{"5. Strict Verification Gate"}
    Verify -- FAIL: Surgical Repair Prompt --> Edit
    Verify -- PASS --> Review["6. Reviewable Handoff (HandoffPacket)"]
    Review --> Remember["7. SQLite Memory & Session Snapshot Saved"]

🚀 New in v0.19.0: Swarm Planning & Pluggable Indices

• Conflict-Aware Swarm Scheduling (PlanGraph): Broad goals are decomposed into collaborative swarms. Overlapping touch scopes are isolated into Conflict Groups and serialized, while independent subtasks run concurrently to optimize execution time.
• Pluggable Code Indexing: Upgraded phonton-index with a pluggable CodeRetriever trait. Supports default high-performance local-hnsw search and external qdrant HTTP vector storage for larger enterprise repositories.
• Dynamic MCP Capability Discovery: Run phonton mcp capabilities <server-id> [--yes] to preview server info, exposed tools, and sandbox permission proposals safely before initiating any tool execution.
• Robust Browser Verification: Dynamically injected NODE_PATH resolution guarantees Playwright DOM and interaction tests run flawlessly on isolated temp directories and production workspaces alike.

⚙️ Configuration

Configure your direct providers and indexing backend in ~/.phonton/config.toml:

[provider]
name = "deepseek"
model = "deepseek-v4-flash"

[provider.keys]
deepseek = "sk-deepseek-api-key-here"
anthropic = "sk-ant-api-key-here"
openai = "sk-proj-openai-key-here"

[index]
backend = "local-hnsw"

To enable the external Qdrant backend:

[index]
backend = "qdrant"
qdrant_url = "http://127.0.0.1:6333"
qdrant_collection = "phonton-code"

🛠️ Commands Reference

# Launch the interactive Ratatui TUI
phonton

# Run a goal non-interactively through the full plan/edit/verify pipeline
phonton goal "add input validation to config loading" --yes

# Preview the subtask graph and Conflict Groups without editing files
phonton plan "refactor auth layer"

# Audit configuration, API keys, database, and vector index connectivity
phonton doctor --provider

# Export benchmark telemetry from the latest run
phonton benchmark export --latest --format json

🗺️ Crate Architecture

Phonton is written entirely in Rust for performance, correctness, and low memory overhead:

• phonton-cli: Interactive TUI, headless runner, benchmark, and CLI commands.
• phonton-planner: Multi-model goal decomposition and PlanGraph sidecar staging.
• phonton-orchestrator: Swarm scheduler, Conflict Group serialization, and verifier pipeline execution.
• phonton-worker: Highly optimized context assembler and diff-only code modifier.
• phonton-index: Local HNSW symbol index and Qdrant integration.
• phonton-verify: Four-layer static checkers (Tree-Sitter, Cargo, Playwright Browser/Screenshot).
• phonton-mcp: Lazy initialization client, permission gates, and capabilities descriptor.

💖 Star History

If you support a privacy-first, fully autonomous developer experience, please leave us a star!

📄 License

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)
• MIT License (LICENSE-MIT)

At your option.