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Sarath C
Sarath C

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I Built an Autonomous CLI Agent – Here's How It Works

#agents #ai #cli #showdev

I've spent the last several months building Krud AI — an autonomous CLI agent that operates entirely in your terminal. No browser, no IDE plugin, no copy-pasting suggestions. It just acts.

The Problem: AI That Helps But Doesn't Do

Most AI developer tools fall into one of two patterns:

  1. Chat-based — you describe a problem, the AI returns text, you implement it yourself.
  2. Inline suggestions — you write code, the AI autocompletes the next line.

Both are useful. Neither is autonomous.

What I kept wanting was something that could take a goal like "this test suite is failing on CI, fix it" and actually go fix it — running commands, reading logs, making changes, verifying the result — while I worked on something else.

That's what I built.

What Krud AI Actually Does

Krud AI is a CLI agent. You run it in your terminal, describe a task in plain English, and it executes it.

curl -fsSL https://install.krud.ai | sh
krud login
krud chat
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From there, you talk to it like a colleague who has full access to your terminal:

> The integration tests are failing after I added the new auth middleware. Fix it.
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Krud will:

  1. Plan — break the goal into concrete steps
  2. Execute — run shell commands in your real environment
  3. Observe — read stdout and stderr, detect errors, adapt
  4. Complete — finish the task or ask a targeted question

The Architecture

The core loop is a standard LLM agent loop with tool use:

[user goal] → [plan] → [execute shell command] → [observe output] → [adapt] → [repeat]
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What's less standard is the rolling token budget system. Long autonomous tasks generate a lot of context. The rolling budget dynamically summarizes older context while keeping recent tool outputs verbatim — letting Krud handle long multi-step workflows without losing state.

Real Use Cases

Debugging CI failures:

> My GitHub Actions build is failing. Here's the workflow file. Fix it.
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Scaffolding from a description:

> Create a FastAPI service with Postgres, Docker Compose, and a /healthz endpoint
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Automated git workflows:

> All changes in this PR are reviewed. Squash-merge to main.
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Cross-file refactoring:

> Rename the User model to Account across the entire codebase, including tests
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What Makes It Different

  • Copilot CLI is great for single-command suggestions. It doesn't execute multi-step workflows autonomously.
  • Warp AI is a beautiful terminal emulator with AI features. It's not autonomous — it still relies on you to run commands.
  • Krud AI is purpose-built for autonomy. It executes, observes, and adapts on its own.

Install 

curl -fsSL https://install.krud.ai | sh
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Supports macOS Apple Silicon, macOS Intel, and Linux x86_64.

Free trial, no credit card: https://dabcloud.in
GitHub: https://github.com/max345789/krud-ai

Would love feedback — especially from people running it on Linux or unusual setups.

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