What is minimax-agent?

This project is an example chatbot application that shows a language model thinking and taking actions in real time, streaming its responses to a web page as they are generated. It connects to MiniMax, an AI provider, using an API format compatible with OpenAI's chat interface. The chat interface itself is built with Astryx, an open source design system from Meta, so the buttons, message bubbles, and chat layout come ready made rather than built from scratch. Beyond just chatting, the assistant can use a set of 26 built in tools grouped by purpose: reading the current time, doing arithmetic, writing files, running shell commands in a sandboxed folder, searching the web, and more. As the assistant works, each tool call it makes is shown directly in the chat so a user can see exactly what it is doing, not just its final answer. A sidebar file explorer lets a person browse, create, rename, upload, or delete files in that same sandbox, and any destructive change can be undone with a popup notification. The backend is a small Express server that keeps the conversation going in a loop, sending each user message and any tool results back to the model until it produces a final answer without requesting another tool, or until a safety limit of six rounds is reached. Conversation history can optionally be saved to a Postgres database with vector search support, but the app works fine without a database configured, in which case those extra saving features are simply turned off. Setting it up means installing dependencies with npm, adding a MiniMax API key to an environment file, and running one command that starts both the frontend and backend together. The frontend is built with React, TypeScript, and Vite, and the whole project is released under the MIT license.