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

#cli #ai #terminal #devtools

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.

The Problem

Every developer I know has the same experience: you're deep in a project and need to do something slightly outside your muscle memory — a complex git rebase, Docker networking, a database migration. You open a browser, search, copy-paste, 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:

Understands your intent — using Claude (Anthropic's AI)
Plans the steps — breaks the task into shell commands
Executes autonomously — runs commands, reads output, adapts on failure
Reports back — shows what it did and found

It's not a chatbot wrapper. It's an agent with real shell access.

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)
    ├── /v1/chat — Claude API with tool use (bash execution)
    ├── /v1/account — User management
    ├── /v1/billing — Stripe
    └── Database: Supabase PostgreSQL

The Animated Rabbit

When Krud is thinking, a purple Unicode rabbit animates in-place — no screen clearing, smooth ANSI in-place updates using crossterm and a background thread with AtomicBool 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"