> clai: your useful command line helper!

Hey guys, I’d like to present my ongoing project I co-authored (with the help of codex-cli :raising_hands: ). This extremely useful command line tool that provides a natural language way to describe what you want to happen at the terminal.

AI has brought a lot of budding new developers into the space and it is extremely useful for CLI beginners, making the terminal much more accessible for all.

It is also great for experienced users - very handy for formulating complex piped commands, or ones you rarely use like that specific but unusual thing you want to do with git but can’t quite remember …

It is bash based and works on WSL Ubuntu and macOS zsh amongst many other platforms. Naturally it leverages the OpenAI API, but will work with others too. It is pretty economical to run as token counts are generally low.

It incorporates a traffic light risk level indication :vertical_traffic_light: by colouring the proposed command appropriately. “Dangerous” commands, e.g. things which will change things permanently like deletes, prompt for additional confirmation.

Lots of useful info in the README on the repo …

Please give it a :star: on github if you find it useful!

Feedback and ideas welcome … enjoy!

Adds a configurable “risk appetite” setting to allow CLAI to automatically execute lower-risk model-suggested commands without prompting, whilst preserving confirmation for higher-risk commands.

This makes usage much faster for more experienced users.

Changes:

  • Introduces risk_appetite config (default 0) with setup-wizard support and normalization.
  • Adds execution gating logic to skip confirmation prompts based on command risk + risk_appetite.
  • Updates README documentation and expands smoke tests to cover auto-run vs prompt behavior.

Enjoy :rocket: