Universal Coder

Status: Archived. This project is preserved in its original form as a historical artifact.

Overview

Universal Coder is an early prototype of an agentic development assistant built on ChatGPT (GPT‑3.5). The idea of “agentic” tooling appeared around 2023 (three years before this archive), and this repository captures one of the first working versions.

Project layout:

• services/core — NestJS backend with a “model → tool → model” loop.
• services/client — a minimal React client that subscribes to events.
• services/docker-compose.yaml — runs the two containers.

How It Worked

The service sends a prompt to the model and then processes the response. If the model returns a tool command, the backend executes it in the shell and sends the result back to the model, repeating until a final response is produced.

Key files:

• services/core/src/chat/consts.ts — system prompt describing the tools.
• services/core/src/chat/chat.service.ts — the model interaction loop.
• services/core/src/util/terminal.ts — command execution and stdout/stderr capture.
• services/core/src/chat/controller/chat.controller.ts — HTTP API and control flow.
• services/client/src/* — minimal UI for displaying messages.

Key tools (from the system prompt):

• EXECUTE [command] $END — execute a terminal command.
• READOUT limit=... skip=... — read stdout.
• READERR limit=... skip=... — read stderr.
• CRON [seconds] $END — wait and check status.
• SIGINT $END — interrupt execution.
• ASK [question] — ask a human.

Example Commands

Example user request:

List the files in the project and tell me what you see.

Possible agent response (tool command):

EXECUTE ls -la $END

Reading output:

READOUT limit=500 skip=0

Architecture (Simplified)

1. The client sends a message to POST /chat/query.
2. ChatService sends the request to the model.
3. If the model returns a tool command, the backend executes it (Terminal.exec).
4. The result is sent back to the model.
5. Once the response is plain text, it is returned to the client.

Quick Start (As It Was Back Then)

cd services
make up

Defaults:

• client — http://localhost:3000
• backend — http://localhost:3005

Note

This repository is archived. The code is no longer maintained and may require updates for modern SDKs and environments.

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If you found this repository: it is not a “product,” but a preserved snapshot of an early agentic development idea.