Developer builds a coding agent from scratch just to learn how they work
A developer who uses (AI tools that write code on your behalf) daily grew frustrated at not understanding what happens between hitting enter and getting code back, so they built their own , called Orin, to find out. Most of the code was AI-written, but the project followed a real software development process: writing a spec, filing an issue, implementing it, and going through PR review, rather than blindly accepting every change (often called ). The idea isn't original — the developer read through the code of existing pi.dev, nanocoder, and opencode as primary references, and skimmed Cline and Kilo Code for additional patterns.
Key points
- A developer used daily but felt they were a black box, so they built one
- Built a called Orin, with most of the code AI-written
- Followed a real spec-issue--PR review process instead of
- Read pi.dev, nanocoder, and opencode as main references, skimmed Cline and Kilo Code for patterns