ai-cli
A terminal assistant you talk to in plain English. It works out the command, and you decide whether it runs.
I built a terminal tool called ai-cli.
You type what you want in plain English. It works out the command.
pipx install aicli-xWhy
I know what I want the terminal to do. I do not always remember the flags.
tar is the obvious one. So is find with anything past -name. So is
whatever combination of awk and cut gets a column out of a log file. You
look it up, you use it, and by the next time you have forgotten it again.
The knowledge is there. The syntax is not. That gap is the whole problem this is trying to close.
How it runs
ai # opens a REPL
ai "fix this" # one-shot
ai --shell "list files" # command only, nothing executed
ai --setup # re-configure
ai doctor # environment and security checks
ai dashboard # telemetry and session view--shell is the one I use most. It prints the command and stops. I read it,
and I decide whether it runs.
Not running things on its own
A tool that turns English into shell commands and then executes them is a tool that will eventually delete something you wanted.
Language models are confident when they are wrong. In a terminal that is not a bad answer, it is a bad outcome, and there is no undo.
So the default is to show you the command. doctor exists for the same reason:
before trusting it with anything, you should be able to see what it can reach
and what it is allowed to do.
tl;dr
Type what you want in the terminal. It writes the command. You decide whether it runs.