Bullet

Bullet is a CLI-based coding agent built for speed, currently in private beta and available for free on macOS and Linux. Backed by Y Combinator, it was created out of frustration with slow agent machinery and is designed to keep pace with fast-moving developers. The team reports a 95.8% score on SWE-Bench Verified, which they published in a dedicated benchmark results post.

What It Is

Bullet is a terminal-native AI coding agent that wraps a model-tools-results loop in a leaner execution system. Rather than embedding an entire repository or queuing tool calls sequentially, it uses targeted search, smart routing, and parallel execution to reduce the time between a developer's intent and a working result. It is installed via npm and requires no API key to start.

How the Agent System Works

Bullet's architecture is built around three core protocols:

• Route / Escalate: Straightforward tasks are sent to fast models; complex or harder tasks are escalated to deeper reasoning models automatically.
• Search / Acquire: Targeted search and selective file reads surface relevant code without loading the full repository into context. The demo shows relevance-scored results (e.g., 94.2, 88.7) from a small fraction of the repo.
• Parallel Execution: Independent tool calls — search, read, verify — run simultaneously. Duplicate calls and stuck loops are intercepted before they waste time.

The homepage describes this as "a tighter loop" around the same model → tools → results pattern used by other agents.

CLI Setup Path

Bullet is distributed as a CLI package installable via npm:

npm install -g @trybullet/cli
bullet

It requires Node 18+ and runs on macOS and Linux. Linux users can also download a .deb package or a self-updating AppImage (requires libfuse2 on Ubuntu 24.04). The current release is v1.3.31, published in August 2026.

Current Status: Private Beta

Bullet is in private beta with free access — no subscription required. The GitHub releases repository (trybullet/bullet-releases) serves as the public download host for desktop builds and shows active release cadence, with v1.3.31 published on August 14, 2026. The project is backed by Y Combinator and has an active Discord community.

Why It Stands Out

The founders describe building Bullet as a "passion project" born from daily use of Claude Code and observing capable models slowed by heavy surrounding infrastructure. The design philosophy prioritizes eliminating dead time: no queuing of parallelizable work, no unnecessary context loading, and no runaway loops. The benchmark claim of 95.8% on SWE-Bench Verified is vendor-published and detailed in a separate blog post on the Bullet site.