Introduction

clai is a command-line interface that integrates multi-vendor AI models directly into your terminal workflow. Built as a fast, composable Go binary, clai follows unix philosophy: pipe stdin into prompts, stream responses to stdout, chain tool calls over the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and manage conversations without leaving your shell.

Core commands

Command	Shorthand	Description
clai query <prompt>	q	Run a one-shot query with arguments and optional piped stdin.
clai chat	c	List, continue (c c <id>), summarize (c s), inspect (c dir), or delete saved and external coding-agent conversations.
clai replay / dir-replay	re/dre	Print the last reply again. Not the -re/-dre flags, which send a follow-up.
clai photo <prompt>	p	Generate images with configured photo models (-pm, -pd, -pp).
clai video <prompt>	v	Generate videos with configured video models (-vm, -vd, -vp).
clai audio transcribe	a t	Transcribe audio files or stdin (-) with configured audio models (-am, -af).
clai tools / clai mcp	t	List available builtin and cached MCP tools (clai tools), or authorize MCP servers (clai mcp auth <server>).
clai profiles / confdir	—	List, install, trust and publish profiles (clai profiles), or print the configuration directory (clai confdir).
clai cloud	—	Optional: log in to clai.chat, then pull and commit your config and conversations like git.
clai setup	s	Interactive TUI wizard for configuring general configs, model files, profiles, MCP servers, and shell contexts.
clai version	—	Print the installed clai version and build information.

Supported LLM vendors

clai supports twelve hosted vendors and local Ollama out of the box. You bring your own API key from the vendor, and the vendor bills you for usage.

• Anthropic (Claude Opus, Sonnet, Haiku)
• OpenAI (GPT and reasoning models)
• Google (Gemini models)
• Mistral, DeepSeek, xAI (Grok) and OpenRouter
• Berget, HuggingFace, Inception and Novita
• Jev (typesafe.ai), which answers a fixed set of questions about the data you pipe in, set with -rf
• Ollama for local offline models

See Supported vendors and Configuration for vendor setup details.

clai.chat

The CLI is fully local: it runs, stores conversations and reads its config on your machine, and works the same without an account. clai.chat adds two optional services:

• Sync: clai cloud login once per machine, then clai cloud pull and clai cloud commit move your config and conversations like git. Nothing syncs on its own. Config sync is free; conversations cost $1 per started GB a month. See Pricing.
• Hub: publish a profile, MCP server, shell context, SKILL.md skill, theme or prompt, rate other people’s, and run one with clai -profile-path cchub:<handle>/<name>. See Share and rate configs.

Read Quickstart to get going.