claupe

A headless wrapper around the claude TUI for programmatic use.

Claude supports programmatic access via claude -p, but that usage is billed separately from your interactive subscription and can get expensive. claupe is a wrapper around the claude TUI that allows you to use it in a headless way, so your requests still bill against your interactive subscription instead.

How to use it

Install it globally using:

npm install -g claupe

Then you can run:

claupe "<prompt>"              # positional prompt
git diff | claupe "review"     # stdin is appended to the prompt
claupe -p "<prompt>"           # -p accepted for muscle memory

Each invocation is a fresh claude conversation. You can use claupe in scripts, cron jobs, or just for quick questions in the terminal.

Caveats

• Every call cold-starts claude (~3s). Fine for cron and one-shot scripts; bad for tight loops.
• --dangerously-skip-permissions is required so claude can run the callback unattended. Only run claupe in workspaces where that's acceptable.
• No defense against prompt injection in piped stdin. If you cat untrusted.txt | claupe ... and the file contains adversarial instructions, claude may follow them. With --dangerously-skip-permissions that includes shell commands. Only pipe content you trust.
• The interactive/programmatic split is Anthropic's call, not a hard technical line. If they later decide to flag TUI traffic that comes from a PTY without a real human, this trick stops working.

License

MIT License