Tag: Rio

I’ve been working on Rio, a coding agent designed to run without a human continuously steering it. A task may take minutes, hours, or days. The agent needs to keep making progress even when nobody is watching.

The first versions of Rio used Jupyter notebooks as both context and execution environment. The model could write and edit cells, execute them, and use their results to decide what to do next.

This worked surprisingly well. A notebook is already a structured, executable document. It has cells, outputs, and a format that can be saved to disk. There is no need to invent a new programming language or an elaborate workflow graph.

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Rio 0.7.1 is out. This is a big change to Rio’s core.

Thanks to Rulin Shao’s work on context management. There is a new way for managing context. Rio took it one step further: instead of treating context as a file to edit, treat it as a mutable, executable document. Jupyter notebook is picked because it already has a stable specification and a runtime.

@RulinShao Nice work. I fit CLM in for coding agent Rio: 1. LLM context is .ipynb. 2. LLM changes a cell in each turn. - codemode natively supported. 3. Instead of CLM's file updates, Rio uses json patch inspired by SKILL.state.

Fewer turns, less tokens https://t.co/YYJDYiSmpl https://t.co/SyxBwPF95N

— soasme (@soasme) October 3, 2026

Rio 0.5.0 is released. It’s a one-shot agent framework that removes humans from the loop entirely.

Other agent tools like Pi and Cursor offer mid-turn steering: you can prompt the agent mid-execution with options like -p, inject guidance, course-correct decisions. It feels powerful.

Rio takes the opposite approach. When an agent loop starts, it runs to completion or fails—no interruption, no mid-stream prompting, no human steering.

Why Remove the Human?

Mid-turn steering doesn’t scale. It works once, for one operator, on one task. But at scale—when you run the same agent hundreds of times, across a team, or in production—you can’t be present to steer every run. Each mid-turn intervention is a symptom fix, not a system fix. The instruction was wrong. Instead of fixing it, you bent this one execution.

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