Show HN: Clai – Context engineering for terminal powerusers

Test coverage: 68.860% 😌👏

clai

(/klaɪ/, like "cli" in "cli mate") is a command line context-feeder for any ai task.

Installing:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/baalimago/clai/main/setup.sh | sh

You can also install via go:

go install github.com/baalimago/clai@latest

Then run:

clai help | clai query Please give a concise explanation of clai

Either look at clai help

or the examples for how to use clai

. If you have time, you can also check out this blogpost for a slightly more structured introduction on how to use Clai efficiently.

Install Glow for formatted markdown output when querying text responses.

• Add any MCP server you'd like by simply pasting their configuration.MCP client supportVendor agnosticism- Use any functionality in Clai withmost LLM vendorsinterchangeably.- Create, manage and continue conversations.Conversations- Pre-prompted profiles enabling customized workflows and agents.ProfilesUnix-like- Clai follows theunix philosophyand works seamlessly with data piped in and out.

All of these features are easily combined and tweaked, empowering users to accomplish very diverse use cases. See examples for additional info.

OPENROUTER_API_KEY

Text models, use prefixor:

MISTRAL_API_KEY

Text modelsOPENAI_API_KEY

Text models,photo modelsANTHROPIC_API_KEY

Text modelsGEMINI_API_KEY

Text models,photo modelsHF_API_KEY

Text models, use prefixhf:

XAI_API_KEY

Text modelsINCEPTION_API_KEY

Text modelsollama:

(defaults to llama3), server defaults to localhost:11434Shell completions are also available:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions
clai completion bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/clai
mkdir -p ~/.zsh/completions
clai completion zsh > ~/.zsh/completions/_clai

For zsh, ensure your fpath

includes the completions directory before compinit

, for example:

fpath=(~/.zsh/completions $fpath)
autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

Then restart your shell or reload your shell configuration.