🧞 genie

Translate plain English into shell commands.

$ genie
🧞 What do you need? what's in the desktop folder?

  $ ls ~/Desktop

  Copied to clipboard!

Genie supports both Claude and Codex as non-interactive backends. Claude is the default provider.

Prerequisites

• One supported provider CLI installed and logged in:
• Claude Code CLI for the default claude provider
• OpenAI Codex CLI for the optional codex provider

Install

Homebrew is the recommended install method:

Homebrew

brew install saadjs/tap/genie

Usage

# Interactive mode (recommended — handles apostrophes and special chars)
genie

# Inline mode
genie show me all files in this folder
genie "what's in the desktop folder?"

# Auto-execute (asks for confirmation before running)
genie -r list all go files

# Explain an existing command
genie --explain "ls -la | grep .go"

# Show recent history
genie --history

# Use Codex instead of Claude
genie --provider codex show me all files in this folder

Flags

Flag	Description
--explain	Explain an existing shell command
--history	Show the last 20 saved requests/commands
--provider	LLM provider: claude or codex
-r, --run	Show the command, then ask to execute it
--model	Override the provider model
-v, --version	Print version

Config

Optional config file at ~/.genie.yaml:

provider: claude # or codex (default: claude)
model: haiku # default is haiku for claude, gpt-5.4-mini for codex
auto_run: false # Execute the suggested command automatically (default: false)
clipboard: true # Copy the suggested command to clipboard (default: true)

Features

• Translate plain English into shell commands
• Explain existing shell commands with --explain
• Show recent history with --history
• Copy suggested commands to the clipboard by default
• Warn before risky commands such as sudo, recursive rm, mkfs, and device writes
• Optionally run the suggested command after confirmation

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/saadjs/genie-cli.git
cd genie-cli
make build
./bin/genie

Testing

make test

How it works

Genie sends your plain English request to the selected provider CLI in non-interactive mode. Claude uses claude -p; Codex uses codex exec. The response is parsed and displayed as a shell command. Nothing is executed unless you use the -r flag and confirm.