AskAI

A command-line utility for asking AI questions. It sends your question to the OpenAI API.

The command-line options are becoming more stable now but this is still beta.

Usage:

ask "Write a summary for me"

You can also set a system message, which reads from a file:

ask -s future "What does the future hold?"

You can now pipe questions in via standard input:

ask < question.txt

Getting Started

• Add the OPENAI_API_KEY to your environment variables
• Compile ask

Ask reads the OpenAPI key from the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable and uses that to authenticate with the API. So, add your key to the environment with something like the following.

export OPENAI_API_KEY=your_key_goes_here

Alternatively, add the above export statement to the ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or equivelent file.

Configuration

You can store preamble text in the ~/.config/ask/system/ directory as text files. For example, create a file called future.txt there and put the following text into it.

It's the year 2053.

Now you can run the following command to ask questions using the future preamble.

ask -s future "What does the future hold?"

Ask uses the XDG Directory Specification to store files in a way that is cross platform friendly.

This directory is called system because OpenAI refers to the preamble as the system message. By default it's something like, "You are a helpful assistant." Setting this is extremely useful for fine tuning the answers you get from the AI.

Compiling

There is also a build.sh shell script that cross-compiles ask for lots of different architectures. This puts all the builds in the ./docs folder. Run the following command to build all the architectures.

./build.sh

You can also compile ask by by running the following command in the root directory. This builds for the current architecture and outputs the file in the current directory.

go build

Arguments

Usage: ask [options] "question"
Options:
  --help  Display help for the list of command-line arguments
  -q      Repeat the question before answering it
  -s      Read the specified file into the system role as a preamble

Future

Some things I might want to do in the future.

• Add a license
• Build binaries for popular operating systems
• Add an option to change the model
• Maybe support other AI API's

The Name

I use the names AskAI and Ask interchangably. The official name of the project is AskAI but I use Ask for short and for the command-line filename. I do so because Ask is not specific enough for search queries or conversations but it works well as the name of the command-line binary.