I wanted to use web-based AI chatbots — Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Qwen — for actual development work, not just Q&A. The free tiers are generous, and I didn't want to be locked into a single coding agent or pay for API access just to get an assistant to touch my code. But the moment you try to actually use a web chat for real dev work, you hit the same wall every time: you either paste in your whole codebase manually every session, or you give up and reach for a paid extension with an API key behind it.
So I built ** AI Bridge** — a CLI tool that bridges a local codebase and any browser-based AI chatbot. No API keys, no extensions running in the background, no vendor lock-in. You pack your code, paste it into whichever AI chat you're using, and apply the changes back with a command.
Coding agent apps and API-based tools work, but they come with tradeoffs I wanted to avoid:
The tradeoff is that browser chats don't have direct filesystem access. AI Bridge closes that gap without turning it into full manual copy-pasting.
There are two modes, depending on project size.
Simple Mode is for projects small enough to fit in a single prompt. You pack the codebase, upload it along with a couple of prompt templates, and apply the AI's response back to your files:
dotnet tool install --global Tools.AIBridge
cd /path/to/your-project
ai-bridge init
ai-bridge pack
ai-bridge apply --paste
Advanced Mode is for larger codebases, where up everything every time burns tokens and adds noise. Instead, you generate a one-time index.xml
map of the project. From then on, the AI requests only the specific files it needs for a given task, and AI Bridge gathers and bundles just those into context — so you're not re-up the whole repo on every prompt.
It respects .gitignore
automatically (via git ls-files
), and there's an .aiignore
file for excluding things like test fixtures or generated code that the AI doesn't need to see.
It's also not tied to .NET specifically — it detects your ecosystem (.csproj
, package.json
, pyproject.toml
, go.mod
, Cargo.toml
) and groups context files accordingly, so it works with Node.js, Python, Go, and Rust projects too.
Applying changes back works the same way regardless of mode — copy the AI's XML response and run ai-bridge apply --paste
, which reads straight from your clipboard on Windows, macOS, and Linux (X11/Wayland), with a stdin fallback for headless/SSH setups.
Here's a short demo of Simple Mode in action.
dotnet tool install --global Tools.AIBridge
Requires the .NET 10 SDK and Git on your PATH. Full setup and command reference are in the repo.
I built this mainly to solve my own workflow friction, but I'm curious whether it's useful outside that — if you try it, I'd genuinely like to know whether it fits how you work, or where it breaks down. It's MIT licensed, so issues and PRs are welcome too.