Philosophy

Nexis is shaped by a few firm principles. They explain most of the product decisions you’ll run into.

Local-first and private

Your code and your keys stay on your machine. API keys are written to the OS keychain via Rust’s keyring crate — never to disk, never to localStorage. There is zero telemetry: Nexis does not phone home, count you, or ship usage data anywhere.

If you don’t want to use a cloud model at all, you don’t have to — Nexis runs fully offline against LM Studio, MLX, or Ollama.

Lightweight by construction

Nexis is built on Tauri 2 rather than Electron. It renders in the system webview and does the heavy lifting in Rust, so the whole application ships in under 10 MB instead of hundreds. Fast to download, fast to launch, light on memory.

AI with a seatbelt

The AI is powerful but never unsupervised:

• Every file, shell, search, and plan tool call requires explicit approval before it runs.
• AI-proposed edits appear as per-hunk diffs — approve or reject each change.
• The AI context inspector shows exactly what is being sent to the model.
• Private terminals are walled off: the AI cannot read their scrollback.

Transparent and open

Nexis is open source under the Apache-2.0 license, and builds on the open-source terax-ai project. The wire protocol between the app and its ML engines is a documented NDJSON format, and the ML run store is a plain on-disk directory you can inspect.

One window, not five

A terminal, an editor, a debugger, source control, and an AI assistant belong in the same window with shared context. Nexis puts them there so you’re not juggling an editor, a separate terminal, and a chat window that each know nothing about the others.