africalim

Open-source agentic harness for radio-interferometry tooling.

africalim is a small, focused CLI that runs LLM-powered agents over a configurable corpus of radio-interferometry repositories. The first release ships exactly one agent — janskie — a general-purpose Q&A bot that answers questions about radio-imaging tooling and cites the source files it pulled from.

You bring your own API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq — any provider that pydantic-ai supports). africalim never reads keys from disk; only from environment variables.

Quickstart

pip install africalim                                   # or uv add africalim
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...                     # or any other supported provider's key
africalim janskie "what does the gridding step in pfb-imaging actually do?"

The first run will prompt you about consent (see Privacy, below). The default model is claude-sonnet-4-6.

Supported providers

Set the env var matching the provider you want to use:

Provider	Env var
Anthropic	ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
OpenAI	OPENAI_API_KEY
Gemini	GOOGLE_API_KEY
OpenRouter	OPENROUTER_API_KEY
Groq	GROQ_API_KEY
Mistral	MISTRAL_API_KEY
Cohere	COHERE_API_KEY

Override the default per call:

africalim janskie --provider openai --model gpt-4o-mini "..."

Or persistently, in ~/.config/africalim/config.toml:

[model]
default_provider = "anthropic"
default_model    = "claude-sonnet-4-6"

(Edit via africalim config set model.default_model claude-haiku-4-5.)

Pointing at a corpus

For v0.1.0 you clone the repos you want janskie to read from and tell africalim where they live. Edit ~/.config/africalim/corpus.toml:

[[repo]]
name = "pfb-imaging"
path = "~/.cache/africalim/corpus/pfb-imaging"
url  = "https://github.com/ratt-ru/pfb-imaging"
ref  = "main"

[[repo]]
name = "QuartiCal"
path = "~/.cache/africalim/corpus/QuartiCal"
url  = "https://github.com/ratt-ru/QuartiCal"
ref  = "main"

africalim corpus sync (auto-cloning) is on the v0.2.0 roadmap; for now, clone manually:

mkdir -p ~/.cache/africalim/corpus
git clone https://github.com/ratt-ru/pfb-imaging ~/.cache/africalim/corpus/pfb-imaging
git clone https://github.com/ratt-ru/QuartiCal   ~/.cache/africalim/corpus/QuartiCal

Verify by asking janskie a corpus-grounded question:

africalim janskie --question "How does pfb-imaging select a gridder backend?"

A working setup produces a confidence: medium or high answer with one or more entries under Sources pointing at concrete files. Three behaviours to know about:

• No corpus configured. Janskie refuses code-specific questions and returns confidence: low with a caveat telling you to run africalim config / edit corpus.toml. Same response when corpus.toml exists but has no [[repo]] entries.
• Configured repo whose path is missing on disk. Janskie prints a warning: corpus repo 'X' at ... does not exist; skipping line to stderr and continues with the repos that do exist. Use this to spot stale or typo'd paths quickly.
• All configured repos missing. Janskie behaves as if no corpus is configured.

Inspecting and exporting your interactions

Every agent call is logged to a local SQLite database under your platform's user data directory (~/.local/share/africalim/interactions.db on Linux). API keys are never logged.

africalim export --consent all --output ~/africalim-dump.jsonl    # everything
africalim export --agent janskie --since 2026-01-01               # filtered
africalim export                                                  # default: only opt_in records

Filter values for --consent: opt_in (default), opt_out, unset, all.

Privacy

africalim is privacy-by-default: the first run defaults to opt out. Opting in marks records as eligible for upload to a future project-run aggregator endpoint (the endpoint itself is not active in v0.1.0 — opting in is informative only). Full policy in PRIVACY.md.

Change your mind at any time:

africalim config set consent.status opt_in
africalim config set consent.status opt_out

CLI reference

africalim janskie "<question>"     # ask a question
africalim config show              # print the user config
africalim config set <key> <value> # update a config value (dotted key)
africalim config path              # print the path of the user config file
africalim export [...]             # dump logged interactions as JSONL

What's in scope for v0.1.0

• janskie (Q&A agent with citations)
• BYO-API-key model resolution
• Local SQLite interaction log + opt-in upload flag
• TOML user config + corpus config
• JSONL export

What's deferred

• Any agent other than janskie (e.g. a calibration specialist).
• The remote interaction-aggregator endpoint.
• Auto-cloning corpus repos (africalim corpus sync).
• The Streamlit review app (africalim review).
• Embedding-based retrieval (BM25/ripgrep is enough until a concrete failure case demands more).

See plans/africalim_technical_spec.md §8 for the full out-of-scope list and CONTRIBUTING.md for how to propose new work.

Development

git clone https://github.com/landmanbester/africalim
cd africalim
uv sync --group dev --group test
uv run pre-commit install
uv run pre-commit install --hook-type commit-msg
uv run pytest

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide, including the architectural invariants every PR is checked against.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.