Questions people ask before installing

Yes. The agent is MIT-licensed, and by default it uses your own chat.deepseek.com session, so there is no subscription and no API bill. If you connect a paid provider such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini, that provider bills you as usual.

Not for the default DeepSeek backend: during onboarding you paste a session token from the DeepSeek web app. API keys are only needed for extra providers you add with /providers.

It does the same job — an agent in your terminal that reads code, runs commands, edits files and uses MCP tools — and it reads the same CLAUDE.md files and .claude/skills folders. It does not use Anthropic’s models by default; to use Claude you add an Anthropic endpoint and pay for the API.

Codex CLI is open source (Apache-2.0) and runs on a ChatGPT plan or an OpenAI API key, within that plan’s usage limits. PoopRusteek runs on a DeepSeek web session by default, can switch between several providers, and adds a GOAL loop, offline RAG and a local OpenAI-compatible server. Both are written in Rust and both read AGENTS.md.

deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner through the built-in DeepSeek web client; any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, OpenRouter and others); the Anthropic Messages API; and Google Gemini.

Yes, natively. pooprusteek-setup.exe installs per user without admin rights and adds PATH and a Start-menu shortcut. Builds exist for Windows x86_64 and arm64.

macOS on Apple Silicon, and Linux on x86_64 and arm64 with glibc 2.39 or newer (Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13 and later), both with a one-line install script. There is no Intel Mac build, because ONNX Runtime ships no prebuilt library for it.

Yes, under the MIT licence. The source, the release pipeline and the installers are all on GitHub.

To the model provider you use, and nowhere else. There is no telemetry and no account with the project; the RAG index and the embedding model stay on your disk.

No. PoopRusteek uses the reverse-engineered web API of chat.deepseek.com and solves its proof-of-work locally. It is unofficial, it can break when DeepSeek changes something, and you should check DeepSeek’s terms before relying on it for work.

Mostly. Project instructions from CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md and GEMINI.md load automatically, skills are discovered in .claude/skills and similar folders, and MCP servers are imported from Claude Desktop, Claude CLI, VS Code, Cursor and other configs.

Yes. /serve starts a local OpenAI-compatible API on 127.0.0.1:7667 that aider, Continue, Open WebUI or the OpenAI SDKs can point at, and --acp runs PoopRusteek as an Agent Client Protocol server for editors.

/update checks your channel — stable releases or the rolling dev build — verifies the download against the release manifest and swaps the binary in on the next launch. /autoupdate on runs the same check at startup.