Clive — a friendly CLI for local LLMs

A developer built Clive, a local-first coding-assistant CLI powered by Ollama, written in Rust and released as v0.1.0. It enables streaming chat, safe file editing, and multi-file agent tasks entirely on the user's machine, with no data leaving the computer.

For the last couple of weeks, as the cost of frontier models kept climbing, I started experimenting with open-source large language models. What surprised me: for most of the tasks I'd normally hand to Claude or GPT, a local open-source model did the job just as well — and sometimes better. The problem was the ergonomics. Ollama https://ollama.com/ makes running local models genuinely easy, but I wanted a smoother terminal workflow — streaming chat that didn't feel clunky, safe file editing, and the ability to run real multi-file agent tasks without leaving my shell. So I built Clive 🦀 — a local-first coding-assistant CLI powered by Ollama. Everything runs on your machine. No prompts, code, or files ever leave your computer. serve , pull , rm , model recommendationsIt's written in Rust , MIT-licensed, and just hit its first release, v0.1.0 . bash Clone and install from source for now git clone https://github.com/SedarOlmez94/clive.git cd clive cargo install --path . Start Ollama and pull a coding model clive ollama serve --detach clive ollama pull qwen2.5-coder:latest Chat clive chat "Explain Rust's ownership model in two sentences" Or run an autonomous agent over your files preview first clive agent "Refactor error handling and add tests" \ --files src/main.rs \ --verify "cargo check -q"