Company

Mission #

Make the coding agent a tool you own, the way developers own their editor. elelem aims to be the Vim of coding agents: small enough to understand, open for extension, and able to run on your own hardware.

Who it’s for #

Developers and teams who want a coding agent they can read, run on their own machines, and extend in Ruby, with their tools kept in their own dotfiles and repositories.

What works today #

Plugins marked Ready work today and are used daily:

• elelem-builtins: Read, write, run.
• elelem-tools: More tools. Permission prompts.
• elelem-anthropic: Claude, through the Anthropic API.
• elelem-ollama: Local models through Ollama.
• elelem-llama: llama.cpp, in-process.
• elelem-mcp: MCP servers as tools.
• elelem-skills: Agent skills, on demand.

In alpha #

These work, with known gaps tracked in the open:

• elelem-openai: OpenAI chat completions.
• elelem-server: elelem in a browser tab.
• elelem-ratatui: A Rust terminal UI.
• elelem-evals: Test the agent, not the model.

The lab holds experiments in how inference works: small, readable implementations to learn from, not to build on yet.

Why now #

Coding agents went from novelty to daily tool in a few years. Most of them are large, closed, or tied to one model vendor. Meanwhile, open models keep getting better, and laptops can run them. That opens room for an agent that is model-agnostic, local-first, and simple enough for a team to audit.

Who builds it #

elelem is built by mo khan, a software engineer with more than 20 years of experience, most recently on authorization and software supply-chain security at GitLab, GitHub, HashiCorp, and Cisco. mo also maintains open-source Ruby gems for SAML, SCIM, and license scanning. See the résumé.

elelem started as a personal harness and grew into a plugin system as the pieces proved useful on their own. Development is self-funded through contract work. How elelem becomes a business is not decided yet.

Work with us #

We are interested in hearing from:

• Teams that want a coding agent they can run on their own hardware or audit end to end.
• Model and infrastructure providers who want first-class support in elelem.
• Investors and partners who share the view that developer tools should be small, open, and owned by their users.

Get in touch through mokhan.ca.