Senior-engineer outcomes on the hardware you already own. Contrare ARC is a governed autonomous coding agent that runs entirely on your machine — no cloud, no rent, no rate limits.
Everyone else is racing to a bigger brain in someone else's datacenter. We went the other way. Contrare ARC wraps a small 9B model that lives on your machine in an engineering harness so precise the model only ever does the one thing small models are great at: local reasoning over a correct, tiny context.
No exploration. No recall gymnastics. No bookkeeping. The harness does the hard parts — exact call graphs, exact spans, exact provenance — deterministically. The result is senior-engineer behaviour from hardware you'd never expect it from.
We didn't train a bigger brain. We engineered it a better body.
An 8GB laptop GPU is not a constraint — it's the target. Contrare ARC profiles your exact machine against a table of ~70 GPUs, computes a real VRAM budget, and picks the sharpest model that fits.
Fully functional with zero cloud calls. Your code never leaves the machine. Cloud providers are an optional escalation tier — never a dependency, never the default.
Every action runs through a sandbox and a capability policy. A governed action loop gates what the agent can touch — and leaves an auditable receipt for every step it takes.
Your machine, your model, your weights, your data. No telemetry, no lock-in, no rent. When the power's out and the wifi's down, it still works.
A CLI and an IDE in one terminal. Everything lives in a single fixed four-zone workspace — your chats & folders on the left, the agent conversation in the middle, and a five-tab context panel (Notes · Files · Web · View · Graph) on the right. Full mouse, full keyboard, readable to 80 columns.
This entire page is running CLIDE's own theme engine right now. Every palette is WCAG-contrast-gated and degrades gracefully: truecolor → ansi16 → no-colour. Pick one — watch everything re-theme.
Everything hard about autonomous coding — memory, context, safety, learning — lives here, engineered and deterministic. The model just writes. Senior-engineer outcomes. 8GB of VRAM.
Not just the prompt you typed — your real goal. Contrare ARC keeps a hierarchical Project → Feature → Subfeature intent map, so every action serves the outcome, not the sentence.
The codebase is the knowledge store — not the model's context window. A deterministic graph of every symbol, call and reference, queried on demand, never hallucinated from memory.
Same inputs, byte-identical output. No dice-rolling in the mapping pipeline. Every artifact is a receipt with full provenance you can audit, all the way up the chain.
Support for 50 languages, mapped right down to the atom — exact call graphs from real compilers and language servers.
Per-project behaviour learning that compounds. It remembers how your codebase is shaped and how you like to work — and resumes long sessions exactly where they stopped.
It downloads, installs, configures, and maps your repo to the sharpest level your machine allows — hierarchical intent, a behaviour baseline, the full toolchain. No YAML. No GPU shopping list.
Contrare ARC is engineering, not magic — and none of it exists without decades of open-source and open research. Here's what we build on, and who we learned from. Credit where it's due.
…and many more. We build in the open and keep an honest ledger of every dependency.
We'll tell you where things really stand — no vaporware demos. Here's what's shipping, what we're building, and what's on the horizon.
Hardware profiling, model download, receipt-backed repo mapping, and the CLIDE onboarding wizard.
The IDE.harness to rule them all. Rust-built, obsessively IDE-native, and engineered to be as resource-efficient as the rest of ARC.
Optional cloud horsepower for when your machine wants a hand — never a requirement.
If your hardware ever needs a boost, there'll be a hosted tier — priced like nothing you've seen in this space. No rate limits. No usage caps (fair use). And local stays free and unlimited, forever.
The name is the thesis: contrare, to go against. While the industry rents ever-bigger models by the token, we build intelligence you own and run yourself. Two divisions, one belief.
Where the harness is engineered. Contrare Research ships arc — the governed agentic harness — and CLIDE, the interface you've been touching this whole page.
The other half of Contrare. The layer beneath the harness. We're not ready to say more — and we won't pretend otherwise. Something's coming.
Pre-release. When Contrare ARC drops, the people on this list hear first. No spam — one message, when it's real.