Dao Code

Dao Code 道

English · 中文
A terminal coding agent built around cost, experience, and availability — squeezing the most capability and the lowest cost out of the high-value DeepSeek V4.

Dao Code (command dao) is a terminal-native AI coding assistant: it reads code, writes code, runs commands, and fixes bugs right in your terminal — streaming its reasoning and tool calls while executing safely behind an approval gate, until the task is done. It targets DeepSeek V4 (1M context), is Chinese-first, and is inspired by Claude Code — but takes a different road: rather than buying experience with an expensive model, it builds on DeepSeek's strong price-performance and ultra-cheap cache pricing, engineering byte-stable prefixes and cache-reusing forks so cross-session memory and a continuous self-correction layer add almost no token cost.

Why Dao Code?

🌐 Availability

A coding agent is only useful if you can actually run it.

- Claude Code needs an Anthropic account and network access — a high bar to use out of the box in mainland China;
- GLM's Coding Plan has scarce quota that's often hard to grab;
- Dao Code is fully open source (MIT), and its base DeepSeek is register-and-go, pay-as-you-go, directly reachable in mainland China — no network gymnastics, no quota grabbing, no waitlist.

💰 Cost

- Low unit price — DeepSeek sits at the lowest price tier among mainstream capable models; both input and output prices are far below the top-tier closed models.
- Cache cuts it further — DeepSeek's prefix-cache *hit* price is ≈ 1/120 of a miss (~two orders of magnitude). Dao Code keeps the system prefix / tool table / memory byte-stable, and runs reflection & memory on cache-reusing forks, so the hit rate keeps climbing.
- Measured on real OSS bug-fixes (not toy demos) — 7…