aicli

Natural language to live shell commands — OpenAI & Anthropic.

Chat with the model and run suggested commands in your shell in one seamless flow.

The gem is named aicli; the shell command is ai (also available as aicli).

Setup

Requires Ruby 3.0+

Install the gem:

gem install aicli

Or from this repository:

bundle install
bundle exec rake install
# or
gem build aicli.gemspec && gem install ./aicli-*.gem

Choose a provider and set the matching API key.

OpenAI (default) — key from OpenAI:
```
ai config set PROVIDER=openai
ai config set OPENAI_KEY=<your token>
```
Anthropic — key from Anthropic:
```
ai config set PROVIDER=anthropic
ai config set ANTHROPIC_KEY=<your token>
```
Or use the interactive UI (ai config) to pick provider, key, and model. Model lists come from the RubyLLM registry.

Config lives in ~/.aicli/config. Chat/prompt history is stored in ~/.aicli/context (last 40 messages) and reloaded on the next run.

Usage

ai <prompt>

For example:

ai list all log files

Then you will get an output where you can choose to run the suggested command, revise it via a prompt, edit it, copy it, or cancel.

Special characters

Some shells handle characters like ? or * specially. Wrap the prompt in quotes if needed:

ai 'what is my ip address'

Chat mode

ai chat

Ask for shell commands in a multi-turn conversation. When the assistant suggests a command in a code fence, you are asked whether to run it; after it runs (or you decline), chat continues. Press Ctrl+d to quit.

Silent mode (skip explanations)

ai -s list all log files

Or save the preference:

ai config set SILENT_MODE=true

Provider and model

ai config set PROVIDER=openai      # or anthropic
ai config set MODEL=gpt-4o-mini    # provider-specific model id

Defaults: gpt-4o-mini (OpenAI), claude-sonnet-4-6 (Anthropic).

LLM calls go through RubyLLM, so chat streaming and model metadata stay provider-agnostic.

Custom OpenAI API endpoint

Useful for OpenAI-compatible proxies (ignored for Anthropic):

ai config set OPENAI_API_ENDPOINT=<your proxy endpoint>

Default: https://api.openai.com/v1

Set Language

Language	Key
English	en
Simplified Chinese	zh-Hans
Traditional Chinese	zh-Hant
Spanish	es
Japanese	jp
Korean	ko
French	fr
German	de
Russian	ru
Ukrainian	uk
Vietnamese	vi
Arabic	ar
Portuguese	pt
Turkish	tr
Indonesian	id
Italian	it

ai config set LANGUAGE=zh-Hans

Config UI

ai config

Upgrading

ai --version
ai update
# or: gem update aicli

Development

Run the local checkout (not the installed gem) with Bundler from this directory:

bundle install

bundle exec bin/ai --help
bundle exec bin/ai config
bundle exec bin/ai chat
bundle exec bin/ai list all log files

bundle exec loads dependencies from the Gemfile and code from lib/. bin/aicli is an alias of bin/ai.

Example config for local testing:

bundle exec bin/ai config set PROVIDER=openai
bundle exec bin/ai config set OPENAI_KEY=<your token>
# or: PROVIDER=anthropic + ANTHROPIC_KEY=<your token>

Common Issues

Rate limit / quota errors

Usually billing or quota on the configured provider (OpenAI or Anthropic). Check that provider’s console billing page and that the matching API key is set in ~/.aicli/config.

Motivation

I am not a bash wizard, and am dying for access to the copilot CLI, and got impatient.