igni
One spark ignites a team. An AI coding assistant built with Agno orchestration.
ignite-ember.sh
Inspired by Claude Code, igni is a terminal-based coding agent that assembles specialized AI teams on the fly. Describe your task — the Orchestrator picks the right agents, the right team mode, and runs them.
Why igni?
Claude Code uses a single agent loop — powerful but monolithic. igni takes a different approach: dynamic multi-agent orchestration. Instead of one agent doing everything, Agno's team system decomposes tasks, routes them to specialized agents, and synthesizes results — all automatically.
The numbers
Head-to-head benchmark on a 12-case software-engineering suite, 5 runs per system, deterministic grading. See docs/BENCHMARKS.md for the full breakdown.
| igni (MiniMax-M2.7) + CodeIndex | Claude Code (Opus-4.7) |
|---|
| Directly mergeable (✅) | 49 / 60 (82 %) | 31 / 60 (52 %) |
| Needs clarification (⚠) | 4 / 60 (7 %) | 22 / 60 (37 %) |
| Wrong target (❌) | 7 / 60 (12 %) | 7 / 60 (12 %) |
| Reproducibly correct cases (5/5 ✅) | 8 of 12 | 3 of 12 |
| Cost per run | ~$0.05 | $4.01 |
| Wall time mean | 2 331 s | 1 548 s |
igni wins by +18 ✅ trials at 1/80th the cost. The gap is concentrated in the ⚠ band — igni commits to a concrete answer where Claude Code stays in design-conversation mode. Both systems hit the same hard-wrong rate (12 %), so the win comes from converting partial/clarifying responses into directly-mergeable ones.
The architectural choices that drive the gap: (1) CodeIndex queried first, not files — a pre-built semantic + metadata index lets the agent locate reuse targets and conventions by typed filter or HyDE-style code-shaped query, instead of grep-walking the repo. (2) A mandatory "What already exists" preamble — agent must name the reuse target, the closest near-miss it rejected, and the conventions to match before writing any code. (3) A small, focused model with structured tools — MiniMax-M2.7 + index access matches Opus-4.7 quality at 1/80th the price.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Claude Code | igni |
|---|
| Architecture | Single agent loop | Multi-agent teams (Agno) |
| Task routing | Manual sub-agent spawning | Automatic via Coordinate/Route modes |
| Code intelligence | Grep + file reads | Shell-first reads; CodeIndex semantic search as a licensed extension |
| Project knowledge | None | The Artifacts extension (licensed; its own Neo4j store), served through your igni server |
| Planning | Plan mode (read-only) | Agno reasoning + Tasks mode |
| IDE integration | MCP server (stdio) | None — igni ships the desktop app, the web client and the CLI; MCP client (Agno MCPTools) |
| Extensibility | Plugins, hooks, MCP | Agents + hooks + toolkits + MCP |
| Agent evals | Not built-in | Built-in regression testing framework |
| Memory | File-based MEMORY.md | Agno Memory + DB-backed storage |
| Learning | None | Agno LearningMachine (user profiles, entity memory) |
| Guardrails | None | PII detection, prompt injection, moderation |
| HITL | Implicit | Explicit confirmation/input requirements |
| Default model | Anthropic Claude | Whatever your igni server routes to, or your own (model-agnostic) |
Quick Start
brew install ignite-ember/tap/igni-core # or: pip install igni-core (the old name ignite-ember works for both)
cd your-project
igni -m "In one sentence, what does this project do?" # `ignite-ember` if brew installed it
igni is the command; ignite-ember is kept as an alias so existing
shell aliases and scripts keep working. Both are the same entry point —
pip installs both names, the Homebrew formula symlinks one, so a brew
install gives you ignite-ember and a pip install gives you both.
On the command line it runs one task and exits (-m, or -p for a
pipe); there is no terminal chat UI any more — run it bare and it says so.
What the published package holds today. igni-core on PyPI is
v1.0.4, and it is this repository's build: the igni_core module,
the igni command and the decisions service. The old name installs the
same thing — pip install ignite-ember resolves to igni-core==1.0.4
through the alias (packages/ignite-ember/ — metadata, and a dependency
on igni-core at the same version), and the Homebrew formula installs
igni-core as well. The command above works either way. To work on it
instead of installing it:
git clone https://github.com/ignite-ember/igni-core.git
cd igni-core
uv venv && uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
source .venv/bin/activate # puts `igni` on your PATH
The interactive chat is the desktop app and the web client. A headless run cannot ask before it runs a command, so decide
up front what it may do — see
A headless run cannot ask you anything.
To point it at your own igni server, set api_url in your user config,
~/.igni/config.yaml — not a project's .igni/config.yaml or
config.local.yaml, which may not name a server and are ignored for it,
with a warning — and run igni login (or igni login --token-stdin with a
token). That writes ~/.igni/credentials.json, which igni -m and the desktop
app both use. /login is not a shell subcommand: igni /login answers
Error: No such command.
# ~/.igni/config.yaml
api_url: https://igni-api.acme.example
# Only when the portal (the sign-in page) is not on the API's origin,
# e.g. the API on :7777 and the portal on :3000:
portal_url: https://igni.acme.example
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
