OpenBuff 🐃

The open-source, ad-free web experience for Freebuff — the free AI coding agent.

One command starts a clean local web app in your browser, backed by the real Freebuff agent engine working on your files: chat, live tool calls, diffs, terminals, and turn-by-turn git checkpoints.

npx @princetheprogrammerbtw/openbuff@latest

What this is

• Local-first. A server runs on your machine (the execution boundary: files, terminals, git). The web UI is served from it. Nothing of ours runs in the cloud — there is no "ours" to run.
• Freebuff-powered. The agent engine is Freebuff's (via @codebuff/sdk, Apache-2.0) — free-tier models, no ads in this app, no telemetry from this app. Bring a free API key from codebuff.com/api-keys and you're running.
• Flagship UI. A fork of t3 Code' web experience (MIT), refocused around a single engine.

Status: very early fork

This project is a fork of pingdotgg/t3code (MIT), trimmed to its web + server apps. The five upstream provider drivers (Codex, Claude, Cursor, Grok, OpenCode) are replaced by a single Freebuff driver: BUILT_IN_DRIVERS in apps/server/src/provider/builtInDrivers.ts contains exactly one entry.

Roadmap:

• Freebuff driver: @codebuff/sdk inside the orchestration engine (event stream, turn lifecycle)
• Permission approvals via tool overrides (approve terminal commands from the browser)
• Terminal output bridged into the built-in terminal view
• Rebrand sweep (web UI, server strings, package names)
• Turn checkpoints + diff review on Freebuff file changes
• npx @princetheprogrammerbtw/openbuff distribution
• Local browser login (no pairing gate on loopback) + Freebuff CLI credential reuse
• M3 Expressive design language (see below)

Design

OpenBuff's visual language adopts Material 3 Expressive, inspired by rjwarrier/yata — a Material 3 Expressive Android app whose look and feel we brought to the web UI:

• Typography — self-hosted variable fonts under SIL OFL (see apps/web/public/fonts/OFL.txt): Inter Tight (display/headlines), Inter (body/UI), JetBrains Mono (code, terminal, diffs), and Bodoni Moda (expressive display serif). No CDN dependency.
• Shape — the M3 Expressive radius scale (XS 8 · SM 12 · MD 16 · LG 20 · XL 28 · pill) mapped to Tailwind v4 --radius-* tokens.
• Color — a full M3 tonal role set (--m3-* custom properties: primary/secondary/tertiary + on/container pairs, the surfaceContainerLowest→Highest ramp, outline/outlineVariant) in light and dark, seeded from a buff-orange primary.
• Motion — M3 emphasized/decelerate/accelerate/spring easings and nav/sheet/fade/micro durations as tokens, with reduced-motion and off modes that honor prefers-reduced-motion.

Troubleshooting

No native builds needed. The bundled terminal runs on node-pty@1.2.0-beta.15, whose npm tarball ships prebuilt binaries for Linux (x64/arm64), macOS, and Windows — its install script being blocked by npm's default script gating is harmless.

If the server ever exits at boot with Failed to load native module: pty.node (e.g. an exotic libc or architecture), compile the module once — this fails loudly if your toolchain (make/g++/python3) is missing:

cd node_modules/node-pty && node-gyp rebuild

For global installs, run the same command inside the global node_modules/node-pty.

Advisory posture: a fresh npm install @princetheprogrammerbtw/openbuff reports 0 vulnerabilities (npm audit). @codebuff/sdk exact-pins a vulnerable undici@5.29.0 chain that neither dedupe nor dependency-position overrides can reach (and npm 12 removed shrinkwrap), so the pinned clean closure ships physically via bundleDependencies — pre-resolved at publish time and verified by the release script. If an install ever surfaces advisories again, they arrive through upstream (@codebuff/sdk → ai) — please open an issue.

Credits & licenses

• t3 Code by T3 Tools Inc. — MIT. The entire web experience, orchestration engine, and architecture come from this codebase. Go star it.
• Freebuff by CodebuffAI — Apache-2.0. The agent SDK (@codebuff/sdk) powering the engine, plus years of agent-loop engineering we studied closely.
• yata by rjwarrier — the Material 3 Expressive reference that shaped OpenBuff's design language (typography, shape scale, tonal color roles, motion).
• Fonts — Inter Tight, Inter, JetBrains Mono, and Bodoni Moda, self-hosted under the SIL Open Font License.
• OpenBuff is an independent community project, not affiliated with or endorsed by T3 Tools or CodebuffAI. Freebuff is a trademark of its owners; OpenBuff is a client, not a clone of their branding.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. The original t3code copyright notice is preserved as required.