The problem
Cloud coding agents are useful right up until you point them at proprietary code. Then you are shipping your source to a third party, managing API keys, and watching a per-token meter run. For a lot of teams that is a non-starter, not a preference.
miii-cli is the answer to a narrow question: can a genuinely capable coding agent run with nothing leaving the machine?
The decisions that mattered
- Local model execution through Ollama, so there is no internet dependency and no key management. The agent stays on your disk, period.
- A permission system with persistent approval rules, because an agent that can run bash and edit files needs a real consent model, not a yes-to-everything prompt.
- Path confinement that blocks directory traversal, so the agent cannot wander outside the repo you handed it.
- Lossless output spill: truncated tool results page through instead of silently dropping data, which is the difference between trusting the output and double-checking everything by hand.
What it does
It reads code, writes features, runs tests, and fixes bugs from an interactive terminal UI built with Ink. The tool suite covers file read/write, precise edits, glob and regex search, and bash execution. `miii doctor` validates your local model setup before you start, so failures are legible instead of mysterious.
Why it is on this page
It is the clearest statement of how I think about AI products: small surface, real safety model, no hand-waving about privacy. Five S's, on purpose, small, simple, smart, strategic, semantic.