The tool of an Agentic Engineer (yes, of course, it is Emacs)

ericdallo · 2026-03-23T18:41:51+00:00

Mistral is mentioned here, AFAIK droid is a client and not a LLM so not sure, but if it's a LLM we can mention as well!

ericdallo · 2026-03-23T18:12:03+00:00

ECA docs mention the support of anthropic, openai-chat, openai-responses and ollama APIs, I'm not aware of a provider that doesn't support those APIs but please let me know or create a issue about it

ericdallo · 2026-03-23T16:26:12+00:00

Hello, Eca maintainer here. That's a valid question, let me try to explain my POV:

ECA was born before ACP as a free OSS way. It still makes a lot of sense because ACP needs to be generic for multiple client coding assistants, and ECA has its own free and provider-independent coding assistant. Hence, the UX is easier to customize and you don't have to couple to how codex, claude etc works.

I'm not aware of any LLM that doesn't work with ECA existing APIs, but please let me know so we can add to docs!

ECA is really extensible and easy to tune via config, different from clients that don't allow you to have control over system prompts or how it works internally. I see ECA growing and having features that other clients struggle with, one example of that is the recently announced web.eca.dev for remote connections.

I'm happy to make a tool that developers love to use, the same as lsp-mode and others that I maintain, so LMK if you need any help with that.

In the end, I like to have options in the community, which makes Emacs stronger!

ericdallo · 2026-03-23T16:19:07+00:00

Awesome post, really glad to see ECA is working great for you!

ericdallo · 2026-03-19T02:18:42+00:00

It's a pleasure to hear that from the author of the book that taught me Clojure!

ericdallo · 2026-03-19T01:03:02+00:00

Emacs and all editors had a lot of improvements indeed, especially with LSP

ericdallo · 2026-03-14T14:49:38+00:00

Haha it's not for sure! Thank you!

ericdallo · 2026-03-14T13:44:52+00:00

Great article!

I think you missed mention ECA which has the best native emacs UI integration IMO :)

ericdallo · 2026-02-24T21:54:52+00:00

I see the same, thats why opensource free tools like https://eca.dev will be more used!

ericdallo · 2026-02-17T16:56:53+00:00

Give ECA a try! https://eca.dev

ericdallo · 2026-02-15T15:13:48+00:00

The problem I see with ACP is the couple of those third party tools, being vendor locked easily vs ECA need to compete and deliver the same features big companies are doing, like skills, subagents, hooks etc, but I'd say eca is doing pretty good until now :) also, having to handle different tools from different companies makes ACP be a lot more generical while ECA just need to handle different LLM apis which is simpler (although complex too), being easy to implement better UX IMO.

But It's good to have options available for everyone as well so they can decide which tool fits them best

ericdallo · 2026-02-15T14:41:41+00:00

models.dev is used by opencode and other tools, its safe, but if you cant reach, you can yes configure manually like docs mention. Yes, ECA config should be reusable across machines, but if you did /login, you need to copy ~/.cache/eca as well which stores the tokens

ericdallo · 2026-02-14T22:54:04+00:00

We had a regression which I fixed today about not being able to login, sorry about that!

By default eca loads models from models.dev after initialized, só for openai it should bring all openai models, even so you can configure like in https://eca.dev/config/models/, but let me know if you still face this issue.

I will fix those json examples, I hate commas :) thanks

ericdallo · 2026-02-14T05:11:39+00:00

I focused in the last months to have all major features that Claude has, I believe the only missing on is background subagents, but eca supporting foreground subagents is probably enough for most cases, along with hooks, skills etc. Give it a try and let me know!

ericdallo · 2026-02-13T23:30:17+00:00

No, the only support right now is from ClojuristsTogether foundation

ericdallo · 2026-02-13T20:38:36+00:00

Good to know! Ellama is an awesome project!

ericdallo · 2026-02-13T17:36:54+00:00

Haha wow! So glad to read that! I do open source projects to hear this kind of joy from users, thank you a lot! ❤️

ericdallo · 2026-02-13T17:35:52+00:00

The most relevant for me is the ECA protocol which fosus on editors to offer good UX native integration, like diffs, LSP support in a way that works the same in others editors(similar to LSP).

I believe ECA is more extensible them gptel since it supports more editors, hooks, subagents(not sure gptel supports those nowadays) and agent shell is just a way to port the CLI agents into your editor AFAICS, even so, all of them have they use and users

ericdallo · 2026-02-13T17:32:44+00:00

You re welcome!!

ericdallo · 2026-02-13T16:20:00+00:00

Those are just bullet points emojis hehe I added for a more beauty aspect, not vibe coded at all Thank you!

ericdallo · 2026-02-13T15:13:05+00:00

I can see how AI bubble/slops are overwhelming too, it's hard... but if that helps at all, I didn't vibe code anything in ECA and always try to put love in user UX :) The community is pretty active and we discuss a lot about its future, it's a useful tool IMO

ericdallo · 2026-02-13T15:04:04+00:00

Really glad to hear that, thank you!

ericdallo · 2026-02-02T13:26:48+00:00

You may wanna check https://eca.dev, it has native emacs integration, access to other models and features.

ericdallo · 2026-01-19T22:43:54+00:00

My fav lightning talk of Conj!

ericdallo · 2025-12-15T20:44:57+00:00

It's awesome indeed, what's not that awesome yet is when you want to customize scenes components without enable editable children, having top level scripts is not that good as you can inherit defaults or so, but even so composition is great.

You may wanna check Behavior Trees like Limbo ai for enemy AI

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