May 23, 2026 · Plandex
Plandex: terminal agent for large codebases; cloud wound down October 2025, now self-hosted only
Plandex's October 2025 cloud shutdown makes self-hosted or local deployment the only path for new evaluations. HN community threads and changelogs show: branching conversation history as the differentiator vs. aider, TUI friction at launch, Ollama support added in v2.2.0, and self-host-only status confirmed.
Plandex: terminal agent for large codebases; cloud wound down October 2025, now self-hosted only
Plandex is an open-source terminal AI coding agent (MIT license) targeting large, multi-file, multi-step tasks. Its diff sandbox model keeps AI-generated changes separate from the working tree until a developer reviews and accepts them — a deliberate contrast to tools that apply changes directly. The October 2025 cloud shutdown makes self-hosted or local deployment the only path for new users.
What the HN community reported at launch
The original Show HN thread (HN item 39918500, 2024-04-03) surfaced three concrete patterns from the developer community.
Branching conversation history as the differentiator. Cieric highlighted Plandex's ability to branch and revert the AI's conversation history — try an approach, see if it works, roll back and try another. Unlike GitHub Copilot (which modifies narrow regions without a full revert model) or aider (which uses incremental git commits), Plandex maintains a named revision history across the session.
Positioning vs. aider: bigger tasks, more review overhead. Creator danenania positioned Plandex explicitly for large multi-step tasks where aider targets single changes. Commenter anotherpaulg noted that aider's git-commit model provides version control with a simpler mental model; Plandex's sandbox model gives more control but adds a review step before any changes land on disk.
TUI friction at launch. Commenter CGamesPlay criticized the custom diff-review TUI, arguing for standard git diff output instead: "Building a high-quality TUI for side-by-side diffs should not be the thing you are spending time on." The creator acknowledged this and considered reverting to a prior plandex diff command. As of v2.2.1 (July 2025), the diff workflow remains interactive TUI-first.
Cost estimate from the creator. For manageable tasks, the creator estimated cost at "well under $1", noting that costs compound with heavy usage and recommending a cost-benefit analysis against developer time saved. No independent cost verification is available from community threads.
v2.2.0 (July 2025): model provider overhaul
The v2.2.0 changelog (2025-07-01) added: built-in Ollama support for local models, multi-provider failover (direct provider API key falls back to OpenRouter if the primary fails), JSON-based model config with IDE autocomplete via JSON schema, and new model packs including gemini-planner and o3-planner. v2.1.6 (2025-05-27) made Claude Sonnet 4 the default model, replacing Sonnet 3.7.
Cloud wind-down (October 2025)
Plandex Cloud stopped accepting new users on October 3, 2025. The founder accepted an engineering position at Promptfoo and wound down the company and hosted service. Existing cloud customers could continue operating until November 7, 2025. The open-source project (MIT license) remains active on GitHub; latest release: v2.2.1 (July 16, 2025).
Self-hosted deployment requires Docker or a personal server plus API keys from a supported model provider (OpenRouter is the recommended option in the quickstart). Local mode is supported without a server.
Sources: community-thread — HN item 39918500 (2024-04-03); changelog — plandex-ai/plandex releases v2.2.0 (2025-07-01) and v2.1.6 (2025-05-27); community-thread — HN item 43710576 (2025-04-10, Show HN Plandex v2); cloud wind-down: plandex-ai/plandex quickstart.md (observed 2025-10-03).
Field notes synthesized from build evidence ; postmortems, dev-team blogs, and vendor retros. Methodology is public. Corrections to hello@vybing.dev.