Command-Line Chat Clients for LLMs

Hermes Agent is a self-hosted AI agent from Nous Research for people who want an assistant that remembers past work and develops reusable skills. It creates skills after complex tasks, revises them through use, and searches earlier conversations to recover context across sessions. The project is open source under the MIT license.

ShellGPT is an AI terminal assistant for developers and people who work with shell commands. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, turning plain-language requests into commands suited to your operating system and shell. You can review, explain or execute its suggestions, and its Bash and Zsh integrations put generated commands into the terminal input line for editing.

tlm is an open source terminal assistant for people who want help writing shell commands and understanding unfamiliar ones. It runs models on your workstation through Ollama, so command assistance doesn't depend on a cloud service. It works offline and requires no API key or subscription.

mods is a command-line AI tool for people who want to ask questions about command output or use model responses in shell pipelines. It connects to local LLMs through LocalAI as well as cloud services. The project is archived and no longer maintained.

OpenLLM is a self-hosted LLM server for developers who want to connect their applications to models running on their own hardware or servers. Its OpenAI-compatible API works with clients built for that interface, including the OpenAI Python client and LlamaIndex. The project is open source under the Apache License 2.0.

nanochat is an MIT-licensed toolkit for training your own LLM and chatting with it on hardware you control. It's aimed at researchers and developers who want to study or modify the full training pipeline, with a small Python codebase built on PyTorch.

ChatOllama is an AI agent app whose main interface is a command-line client running on your machine. It's for people who want an agent to work with local files while choosing between models served by Ollama and hosted services. The repository license modifies Apache 2.0: commercial hosting and multi-tenant services require authorization, and frontend branding must remain intact.

Distributed Llama runs a local LLM across several computers, sharing both the computation and the model's memory use. It's for people who want to use their own networked hardware for inference rather than keep the entire workload on one machine. The C++ project is open source under the MIT license.

Oterm is a terminal chat client for people who want to use LLMs without leaving their terminal. It connects to Ollama for local models and to cloud providers including OpenAI and Anthropic. Your choice of provider determines where the model runs.

LLM is an Apache-2.0 command-line tool and Python library for sending prompts to local models and remote APIs. Local model support comes through plugins; cloud providers require their own API access. It can also connect to an arbitrary OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions endpoint, including LM Studio.

aichat brings Ollama and cloud AI services into the same terminal interface for developers and people who work at the command line. It runs locally on macOS, Linux and Windows, with Android support through Termux. Model processing happens through the backend you choose: Ollama supports local models, while providers such as OpenAI, Claude and Gemini process requests in the cloud.

Elia is an open source terminal chat client for people who prefer a keyboard-focused interface to a browser chat app. It connects to local LLMs through Ollama or LocalAI and also works with hosted models such as ChatGPT and Claude. The interface runs on your machine; where prompts go depends on the model you choose.

Letta is an open-source platform for AI agents that retain memory across conversations and use experience to improve over time. Formerly called MemGPT, it's for people building or using assistants that need continuity beyond a single chat. Agents can run locally or on a self-hosted server.

MLX LM is an open-source Python package for generating text and fine-tuning language models locally on Apple Silicon Macs. Built on MLX, it suits developers and researchers who want to work with models through Python or a terminal, including adapting models to their own tasks. The package uses the MIT license.

node-llama-cpp is an open source library for developers adding local LLM inference to JavaScript and TypeScript applications. It connects Node.js, Bun and Electron to llama.cpp, running GGUF models on your own machine. Its MIT license allows use in commercial projects.