Stop Googling Commands: Meet Your New AI Terminal Assistant 🚀

#ai #cli #linux #terminal

We’ve all been there. You’re in the flow, coding away, and suddenly you hit a wall. You need to untar a file, but you forgot the flags. Or maybe you want to know the difference between git merge and rebase without reading a 10-minute article.

You Alt+Tab away from your terminal, open a browser, Google it, scroll past the ads, find the Stack Overflow answer, copy the command, switch back to the terminal, and paste it.

Flow = Broken. 🛑

I wanted a way to get answers inside the terminal without the fluff. I wanted something fast, lightweight, and safe.

Meet Ask CLI.

What is Ask CLI? 🤖

ask-cli-ai is a lightweight Node.js tool that connects your terminal to top-tier AI models (Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, or even local models).

It is designed to do one thing and do it well: Get you the info you need and get out of your way.

Why another AI tool?

There are plenty of AI "agents" out there, but many of them try to do too much. They want to write your whole codebase, or worse, they try to execute dangerous commands on your behalf without you knowing.

Ask CLI is different:

It's Safe: It cannot run commands or access files without your explicit authorization.
It's Fast: Optimized for blazing-fast, short, and precise answers.
It's Flexible: Use Gemini, GPT, Claude, or connect to your local Llama instance.

Installation ⚡

Installation is a breeze via npm:

npm install -g ask-cli-ai

Once installed, you can configure your preferred model (supports Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) with ask /models.

How to use it

The goal is to be conversational. You can use ask, or the aliases how and what.

1. The "I forgot the syntax" moment
Instead of Googling, just ask:

ask how to create a zip file with password
# or
how to revert the last git commit

2. Understanding concepts
Quickly get definitions without context switching:

what is the difference between git merge and rebase

3. Analyzing specific outputs
By default, Ask CLI doesn't see your terminal screen or run commands. However, if you specifically want it to analyze an error or a log, you can use the -c (command) flag. This runs the command you provide and sends the output to the AI for explanation.

# Debug a build error
ask why is this failing -c "npm run build"

# Explain a command's output
ask explain this output -c "docker ps -a"

Bring Your Own Model 🧠

One size doesn't fit all. Ask CLI supports a massive range of models, including the latest previews from Google (Gemini 3 Flash/Pro), OpenAI (GPT-5, GPT-4.1), and Anthropic (Claude 4.5).

Privacy focused?
You can even connect it to local providers (like Ollama or llama.cpp) using the OpenAI-compatible API connector.