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Sarath C
Sarath C

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

#cli

I've spent the last several months building Krud AI — an autonomous CLI agent that understands plain English and executes multi-step tasks in your terminal. Today I want to share how it works, what makes it different, and how you can try it yourself.

The Problem

Every developer I know has the same experience: you're deep in a project, and you need to do something slightly outside your muscle memory. Maybe it's a complex git rebase, a Docker networking issue, or a database migration. You open a browser, search, read Stack Overflow, copy-paste a command, realize it doesn't quite fit your situation, iterate...

Twenty minutes gone. Flow state broken.

I wanted a tool that lived in the terminal — where the work actually happens — and could handle these tasks autonomously.

What Krud AI Does

Krud AI is a CLI agent. You type what you want in plain English, and it:

  1. Understands your intent — using Claude (Anthropic's AI) to parse your request in context
  2. Plans the steps — breaks the task into a sequence of shell commands
  3. Executes autonomously — runs commands, reads the output, adapts if something fails
  4. Reports back — shows you what it did and what it found

It's not a chatbot wrapper. It's an agent with real shell access that can iterate on failures.

Architecture 

krud-cli (Rust)
    │
    ├── Auth: Device code flow → dabcloud.in/cli-auth
    ├── Chat: Streaming HTTP to krud-api.onrender.com
    └── UI: Crossterm + purple animated rabbit mascot 🐇

krud-api (FastAPI / Python)
    │
    ├── /v1/chat — Claude API with tool use (bash execution)
    ├── /v1/account — User management
    ├── /v1/billing — Stripe integration
    └── Database: Supabase PostgreSQL
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The CLI is written in Rust for performance and a clean binary distribution. The backend is Python/FastAPI because rapid iteration matters more there.

The Animated Rabbit

One thing I'm genuinely proud of: the terminal UI. When Krud is thinking, a purple Unicode rabbit animates in-place in your terminal — no screen clearing, no flicker, just smooth in-place updates using ANSI escape codes.

  ██ ██
 ████████
██ ████ ██   ← thinking...
  ████████
   ██████
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It uses crossterm for cross-platform terminal control and a background thread with AtomicBool for clean cancellation.

How to Try It 

# macOS
brew install max345789/tap/krud

# Linux
curl -fsSL https://dabcloud.in/install.sh | bash

# Then
krud login
krud "find all TODO comments in this repo and summarize them"
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You get a free trial — no credit card required to start.

What's Next

  • File context: Automatically include relevant files when you ask about code
  • Project memory: Remember decisions you've made across sessions
  • Team sharing: Share agent sessions with your team

The Stack

  • CLI: Rust, crossterm, tokio, reqwest
  • Backend: Python, FastAPI, Claude API, Stripe, Supabase
  • Landing page: Next.js 14, deployed on Vercel at dabcloud.in
  • Infra: Render (backend), Vercel (frontend), GitHub Actions (CI/CD)

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What tasks do you find yourself doing repeatedly in the terminal that you'd love to automate? Drop them in the comments — it helps me prioritize the roadmap.

Try it at dabcloud.in or check out the GitHub repo.

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