we open sourced the #1 coding harness in the world

MIT license. The whole harness. Star it, fork it, run it anywhere.

This morning we open sourced R-CLI. MIT license. The entire harness. github.com/Backboard-io/Backboard-R-CLI Star it. Share it with one developer. That is the whole ask. Here is why it is worth the click. What you are looking at. R-CLI is a coding agent that lives in your terminal. It reads and edits files, runs commands, searches the web, and comes stocked with hundreds of skills and hundreds of MCP connections. Underneath is a recursive engine: the agent hands work to child agents with small, bounded contexts instead of dragging one bloated context through the whole job. Less noise, fewer tokens, higher scores. The score. 85.4% on Terminal Bench 2.1 with Claude Opus 4.8. Full submission shape: 89 tasks, 5 runs, 445 trials, nothing filtered, $280.72 total. That is above every published entry, at about half the cost of the leaderboard leader's published submission. We submitted it for review and the whole thing is public, every trial included: our official Terminal Bench 2.1 submission. Check our math. Bring your own keys. Drop in your OpenAI, OpenRouter, Anthropic, or Grok key and go. A path to hundreds of models, switchable with one command. When a better or cheaper model ships next week, you change a setting, not your tooling. It works best with Backboard. Sign in with a Backboard account and the harness picks up the rest of the stack: memory that ranks first on the leading agent-memory benchmarks, routing, one key for all of it. Plans start at $5 a month. But with your own keys alone it still works extremely well. The score above is the harness doing the lifting. Install is one command. It is at the top of the README. One command covers macOS and Linux, one covers Windows, and you can build from source if that is your style. Open a terminal, paste, and the installer walks you through keys. Why give the harness away? Because we think the conversation about AI coding is stuck on which model to rent. The harness turned out to matter more than the model, so we are putting it in your hands: read it, audit it, fork it, run it on whatever model you choose, wherever your code lives. This is a win for open source and we would rather push that conversation forward than sit on the code. Star the repo and send it to one person who will love it. Rob Imbeault Co-Founder, CEO - Backboard

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