TmuxAI: AI-Powered, Non-Intrusive Terminal Assistant
35 comments
·April 27, 2025kristopolous
rane
Maybe if you could explain what exactly is happening in the savebrace example because it's not clear how it relates to this.
kristopolous
thanks. that's exactly the feedback I need! Appreciated. I put more screenshots here: https://github.com/kristopolous/llmehelp ... maybe that's clearer?
jarbus
Just wanted to say I love this, didn't known I needed this until now.
kristopolous
There's this new thing I'm currently working on. I have a tool that does a clean execvp of what you pass it through, as a total wrapper.
You can do ./tool "bash" and then open up nvim, emacs, do whatever, while the tool sits there passing things back and forth cleanly. Full modern terminal support.
Now here's the thing. You get context. Lots of it. Here's what it can do:
psql# <ctrl-x - the tool sees this, looks at the previous N I/O bytes and reverses video to symbolize it's in a mode> I need to join the users and accounts table <enter>
psql# I need to join the users and accounts table
[ select * from users as u ... (Y/n) ]
This way it follows you throughout your session and you can selectively beckon the LLM at your leisure, typing in english where you need to.
SSH into a host and you're still in it. Stuck in a weird emacs mode? Just press the hotkey and the i/o gets redirected as you ask the LLM to get you out.
But more importantly this is generic. It's a tool that allows you to intercept terminal session context windows and inject middleware, generically and then tie it to hotkeys.
As a result it works with any shell, inside of tmux, outside, in the vscode terminal, wherever you want... and you can make as many tools for it as you want.
I think it's fundamentally a new unix primitive. And I'm someone that researches this stuff (https://siliconfolklore.com/scale/ is a conference talk I gave last year).
If you know of anything else that's like this please tell me I haven't been able to find it.
Btw you cannot do this through pipes, the input of the left process isn't available to the piped process on the right. You can intercept stdin but you don't get the input file descriptor of the left process. The shell starts two processes at the time and then passes things through so you can't even use PPID cleanly without heuristic guessing. Trust me. I tried doing things this way many times. That's why nothing else works like this, you need new tricks.
I intend to package this up and release it in the next few days.
arkasan
Had a terrible experience with warp. I personally don't use warp, but I know one colleague who uses it. One day, he ran `kubectl describe <resource> <resource name>` and warp suggested `kubectl delete <resource> <resource name>` and he pressed enter. He was lucky the resource was not critical and could be recreated without any damage. Think about what would have happened if the same thing had happened for the namespace resource. People go into automatic accept mode after some time, and this is very dangerous when you do anything at the terminal, because there is no UNDO button.
gregwebs
I love warp but I always turned the AI off- the GUI improvements were enough for me. I have maintained a general rule for a long time now that when manual commands are run on production, someone else must be watching what’s going on and approving commands or approve them ahead of time.
zipping1549
LLM + Terminal integration just calls for disaster.
protocolture
My first instinct is that this is super useful.
But then I realise that I do enough sensitive stuff on the terminal that I don't really want this unless I have a model running locally.
Then I worry about all the times I have seen a junior run a command from the internet and bricked a production server.
iaresee
A WIP but evolving, it watches your active tmux panes and allows you to work with AI agents who can interact with those panes. For command line folk, this could feel like a pretty good way to bring AI in to your working life.
dimatura
The "non-intrusive" part is interesting. I've bit the bullet with AI assistance when coding - even when it feels like it gets in the way sometimes, overall I find it a net benefit. But I briefly tried AI in the shell with the warp terminal and found it just too clunky and distracting. I wasn't even interested in the AI features, just wanted to try a fancy new terminal. Not saying warp might not be useful for some people, just wasn't for me. So far I've found explicitly calling for assistance with a CLI command (I've used aichat for this, but there's several out there) to be more useful in those occasional instances where I can't remember some obscure flag combination.
mkbelieve
Uninstalled warp, as the whole thing felt clunky and slow, and never even turned on the AI. You can accomplish everything it does with zsh + plugins without much fuss.
dcreater
Same it performs like an electron app. And the whole must login thing soured me from the start. I don't need SaaS practices for the terminal and I don't trust that they aren't snooping either.
daft_pink
I moved away from Warp as well… to Ghostty. I didn’t find I got much benefit from Warp.
porcoda
Can this be aimed at ollama or some other locally hosted model? It wasn’t clear from the docs since their config examples seem to presume you want to use a third party hosted API.
never_inline
Given ollama has a openai compatible API[0], quick searching in repo returns this
https://github.com/alvinunreal/tmuxai/issues/6#issuecomment-...
jph00
Shellsage has provided this functionality for quite a while. I've been using it for months, and it's been a game-changer for me.
It was created by one of my colleagues, Nathan Cooper.
https://www.answer.ai/posts/2024-12-05-introducing-shell-sag...
dr_kretyn
Interesting. I've been working on a similar project, though with more 'agentic' workflow. It's also in golang, CLI-native but also supports MCP and "just finishing" 'agentic tasks'. Potentially a nice overlap :) https://github.com/laszukdawid/terminal-agent
rcarmo
I already use aider and VS Code Agent Mode (which occasionally asks me to run commands for libraries, etc.)
This seems… like an amazing attack vector. Hope it integrates with litellm/ollama without fuss so I can run it locally.
make3
I wish you could use Cursor in Terminal mode, eg I press a button, a Cursor window opens with the terminal tab taking up all the space. That way we could just reuse Cursor's special+k and special+l instead of having to have a different app with the same functionality
atsaloli
Can I use it with Perplexity API without going through OpenRouter API? I want to try it but I don't want to go through a third party.
inciampati
Just got this running. It took a minute to figure out "where the config file is" but once I got it set up with openrouter keys... wow! This plus speech to text = Look ma no hands!
I've got a similar approach from a Unix philosophy.
Look at the savebrace screenshot here
https://github.com/kristopolous/Streamdown?tab=readme-ov-fil...
There's a markdown renderer which can extract code samples, a code sample viewer, and a tool to do the tmux handling and this all uses things like fzf and simple tools like simonw's llm. It's all I/O so it's all swappable.
It sits adjacent and you can go back and forth, using the chat when you need to but not doing everything through it.
You can also make it go away and then when it comes back it's the same context so you're not starting over.
Since I offload the actual llm loop, you can use whatever you want. The hooks are at the interface and parsing level.
When rendering the markdown, streamdown saves the code blocks as null-delimited chunks in the configurable /tmp/sd/savebrace. This allows things like xargs, fzf, or a suite of unix tools to manipulate it in sophisticated chains.
Again, it's not a package, it's an open architecture.
I know I don't have a slick pitch site but it's intentionally dispersive like Unix is supposed to be.
It's ready to go, just ask me. Everyone I've shown in person has followed up with things like "This has changed my life".
I'm trying to make llm workflow components. The WIMP of the LLM era. Things that are flexible, primitive in a good way, and also very easy to use.
Bug reports, contributions, and even opinionated designers are highly encouraged!