ai-shell

A local-first, privacy-friendly natural-language Linux command assistant.
Ask in plain English (or Chinese). It generates, explains, and teaches shell commands — with your local LLM, no cloud required.

Install · Usage · Backends · Safety · Config · License

English · 简体中文

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Why ai-shell?

Most "AI shell" tools send everything to a paid cloud API. **ai-shell runs against a local model by default** (via [Ollama](https://ollama.com)), so your queries never leave your machine — and it's free to run. When you want more power, you can switch to Claude/Codex CLIs or any OpenAI-compatible cloud API with a single flag.

It's not just a command generator — it's a **learning tool**. It reads the *real* `--help`/`man` pages on your machine, so explanations are grounded in your actual system instead of the model's (often outdated) memory.

Features

• 🧠 Understands intent automatically — generate a command, explain a command, break one down, or answer a concept question. No modes to memorize.
• 📖 Grounded explanations — reads real --help / man output on your machine, so even obscure or third-party commands are explained correctly.
• 🛡️ Safety first — every command is shown before it runs. Three-tier confirmation: normal (Enter), sudo (type y), catastrophic like rm -rf / (must type yes).
• 📝 Script generation — ai script "..." produces a hardened Bash script (set -euo pipefail, quoted vars, dry-run for deletes), runs shellcheck, and warns on any destructive command before saving. Never auto-executes.
• 🔀 Multiple backends — local Ollama, Clau